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THE NORMAN WAIT HARRIS 
MEMORIAL FOUNDATION 


HE Harris Foundation Lectures at the 
University of Chicago have been made 
possible through the generosity of the heirs of 
Norman Wait Harris and Emma Gale Harris, 
who donated to the University a fund to be 
known as “The Norman Wait Harris Memo- 
rial Foundation” on January 27, 1923. The 
letter of gift contains the following statement: 
It is apparent that.a knowledge of world-affairs was 
never of more importance to Americans than today. The 
spirit of distrust which pervades the Old World is not 
without its effect upon our own country. How to combat 
this disintegrating tendency is a problem worthy of the 
most serious thought. Perhaps one of the best methods 
is the promotion of a better understanding of other nations 
through wisely directed educational effort. 

The purpose of the foundation shall be the promotion 
of a better understanding on the part of American citizens 
of the other peoples of the world, thus establishing a basis 
for improved international relations and a more enlight- 
ened world-order. The aim shall always be to give accu- 
rate information, not to propagate opinion. 


In fulfilment of this object, the First Institute 
was held at the University of Chicago in the 
summer of 1924. This series of volumes will 
include the lectures, delivered by foreign 
scholars at these Institutes, in essentially their 
original form. 








K; out } | 
THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT _ 


THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 


THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 
NEW YORK 


THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
LONDON 


THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI 


THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY 
SHANGHAI 


THE OCCIDENT 
AND THE ORIENT 


LECTURES ON THE HARRIS 
FOUNDATION, 1924 


By 
VALENTINE CHIROL 


Sometime Director of the Foreign Department of the Times 





THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO - ILLINOIS 


CopyrricHT 1924 By 
Tue UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 


All Rights Reserved 


Published November 1924 
Second Impression August 1925 


Composed and Printed By 
The University of Chicago Press 
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 


G44, 
C44 o 


FOREWORD 


My choice of the subject with which I have 
attempted to deal in these lectures was largely 
prompted by the recollection of a conversation 
during the Paris Peace Conference with one of the 
members of the American delegation. Hopes were 
still then entertained that the United States would 
be willing to accept a mandate for Armenia or 
Syria, but though my friend was warmly in favor 
— of the mandatory system contemplated by the 

Covenant of the League of Nations, and fully 
§ realized the unique value of American co-operation 
3 in carrying it into effect in those regions where 
“Salone of all the great Powers the United States 
-4 could not be suspected of any selfish ambitions, 
“) he was aay) skeptical as to the likelihood of 
<“his country’s assuming such novel and heavy re- 
4, sponsibilities. “The Orient,” he said, “is too 
‘3 far away from us geographically and _histori- 
cally.” The event bore out his prognostication, 
and one can quite well understand the reasons 
*, which induced the United States to refrain in 
= that instance from any direct intervention in the 

Orient. 


- 


* HElent 


Suge 
- 
=) 


| Lg eee 


{ vii | 


am £ 


Ae! GG 


FOREWORD 


But there is a larger aspect of the relations 
between the Occident and the Orient than the 
American people were perhaps then inclined to 
take into account. Time and space are being 
annihilated today by the conquests of science, 
and all the peoples of the world are being brought 
into increasingly close contact with one another 
under the pressure of material and moral forces of 
which the irresistible momentum is still only 
imperfectly apprehended. They had scarcely be- 
gun to emerge when nearly a half-century ago 
I first “heard the East a-calling.” I have been 
a frequent traveler since then over the greater 
part of the Orient, in the Mohammedan lands of 
Turkey and Egypt and Persia, in that great Indian 
subcontinent under British rule which contains 
alone nearly a fifth of the human race, and in 
China and Japan, the last countries of Asia to have 
been forcibly dragged out of their ancient isolation 
by the masterful impact of the Occident, and I 
have had somewhat exceptional opportunities of 
watching at close quarters the changes which have 
taken place there within the compass of my own 
lifetime. We may call these changes the reawak- 
ening or the revolt of the Orient, but whatever we 
may call them, they have already profoundly 
transformed the former relationships between the 


{ viii } 


FOREWORD 


Occident and the Orient based upon the claim of 
Occidental civilization to inherent and indefeasible 
superiority over the civilizations of the Orient, and 
they already threaten to raise a still more danger- 
ous issue of racial conflict between the white man 
and the colored peoples who constitute the vast 
majority of mankind. 

It is from this broader angle of vision that I 
have ventured now to approach a question to 
which, in so far as it may involve the future of a 
civilization common both to America and to 
Europe, the American people cannot remain 
wholly indifferent, however remote from them its 
origins may seem to be “geographically and 


historically.” 


VALENTINE CHIROL 
CHICAGO 
July, 1924 


[ix ] 


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TABLE OF CONTENTS 


I. THerr ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND. 


II. Tue Passinc oF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


II. Toe Pecutiar Case or Ecypt . 


IV. Tue Great Britiso ExpERIMENT IN INDIA 


V. PRoTEcCTORATES AND MANDATES 


VI. THe New Factor or BoLsHEVISM AND SOME 


GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 


INDEX 


[ xi 


e 


PAGE 


33 
71 
109 


149 


183 


217 





I 
THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND) 


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4 i b 


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Tuk 


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. 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


When I had the great honor of being invited 
by ‘the President of the University of Chicago 
to come over and address this Institute, I 
selected as my subject the very large question of 
the “Relation between the Occident and the 
Orient” for two reasons which I trust you may 
be willing to regard as adequate. In the first 
place, I wanted to choose a subject on which 
I might reasonably hope to speak usefully as it 
is one in which I have taken a deep interest ever 
since I first “heard the East a-calling” nearly 
fifty years ago, and I have been granted a fairly 
long lifetime to observe the momentous changes 
in the Orient which have made havoc of all our 
once comfortable generalizations about an un- 
changing East. In the second place, the subject 
seemed to me to come well within the scope of 
the Norman Wait Harris Foundation as it deals 
with one of the greatest international problems 
of our time—a problem of which, absorbed as 
the Occident is today in probing the deep wounds 


13] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


of the Great War and groping after a cure for 
them, many are inclined to ignore or to underrate 
the magnitude, though it may affect the future 
of the whole human race. 

The discords and the conflicts within the 
Occident are many and grievous, but the nations 
that they divide all belong, broadly speaking, to 
the same type of civilization; and in the fact that 
they are all partners in that civilization I see 
a sure ground for hoping and believing that 
those discords and conflicts will be assuaged and will 
finally disappear under the healing influence of 
time and by the development of new processes of 
international agreement. Between the Occident 
and the Orient, on the other hand, there is no 
such bond of a common civilization. On the 
contrary, the discords and conflicts which divide 
them arise out of the clash of different, and in 
many respects mutually antagonistic, civilizations, 
and the phase upon which they are now entering 
may be roughly described as a general movement 
of revolt throughout the Orient against the ascend- 
ancy of the Occident on the plea either that it has 
learned all that the Occident can teach it, or 
that all the lessons of the Occident are a snare 
and a delusion. The real significance, I think, 
of this revolt is that behind it there is the stirring 


14] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


of ancient world-forces long dormant in the Orient 
but reawakening once more under the masterful 
impact of our modern Western civilization. That 
reawakening assumes many different and some- 
times conflicting shapes, for though we may regard 
the Orient as a whole and the Occident as a whole 
in so far as they stand for distinct types of civiliza- 
tion, the Orient is not one nor is the Occident. 

Contact between individual nations of the 
Occident and individual nations of the Orient 
arose centuries ago under the pressure of many 
different forces and followed in each case different 
lines of development with results which are even 
today vitally different, though revolt against the 
Occident may be their greatest common denomi- 
nator. As I cannot possibly cover the whole of so 
large a field, I have selected for special and more 
detailed treatment the relations of the Occident 
with the three peoples of the Orient—Arabs, 
Turks, and Indians—whose history has been 
most closely interlocked for centuries back with 
that of the Occident. 

The present has its roots in the past and, in 
the Orient especially, in a very remote past, and 
it is from no impertinent desire to inflict a super- 
fluous course of history upon you that I shall 
ask you to explore with me in the first place the 


15] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


origin of the great world-forces which have dug 
the deepest lines of cleavage between the Occident 
and the Orient. For they are in a great measure 
the same forces with which the Orient confronts 
the Occident today. 

We are all of us more or less familiar from our 
school days with the earliest conflicts on record 
between the Occident and the Orient when the 
ancient Greeks repelled the Persian hordes, and 
the Roman Caesars in their turn held the gorgeous 
East in fee. But not until the Greek and Roman © 
civilization had broadened out into the larger civili- 
zation, of which Christianity laid the foundations, 
was the conflict between the Occident and the 
Orient renewed in a shape which has endured to 
our own days. 

In the Occident the vital force of religion is so 
largely tempered by the modern spirit of tolerance, 
often indeed stretched to indifference, that we 
seldom realize that in most parts of the Orient 
it is still a tremendously vital force, and that 
none is more vital there than the great religion 
which was born fourteen centuries ago in the 
deserts of Arabia—the religion which we call 
Mohammedanism, but which Mohammedans 
themselves call Islam, or “‘surrender to the will 


of God.” 
[ 6} 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


Unlike any other great world-religion, Islam 
was born sword in hand, and its message was not, 
like that of Christ, a message of peace, but one 
of war. Twice it has threatened sword in hand 
tooverwhelm Europe. Today its sword has grown 
rusty, but Islam still regards the non-Moham- 
medan world as the world of war—the Dar-el- 
Harb—which at the appointed time its sword, 
resharpened by God’s will, shall so conquer that 
the Dar-ul-Islam—the world of Islam—may at 
last spread over the whole earth. There is hardly 
a city in the Orient, from the Atlantic shores of 
Morocco to the wilds of Central Asia, where this 
promise is not implicitly renewed when the 
Muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, proclaiming, 
from the top of the minaret, in the stillness of the 
night and in the busy hours of the day, to some 
250,000,000 of the human race that there is no 
God but God, and that Mohammed is the prophet 
of God. 

What is the secret, what is the history of a 
creed that has reacted so widely and so continu- 
ously upon the relations of the Occident and the 
Orient? Though the cradle of Islam was not far 
distant from that of Judaism and of Christianity, 
and traces of both can be detected in the teachings 
of its founder, who even professed to revere 


[7] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Moses and Jesus as his own forerunners, it was 
cast from the beginning in a very different mold. 
It is, above all, an unbending creed; for it was 
revealed, as all orthodox Mohammedans believe, 
with absolute finality in the Koran, of which the 
unalterable text was conveyed to the prophet 
Mohammed in a series of divine revelations 
through the angel Gabriel. 

The sacred book is for all true believers the 
basis of all spiritual, social, and political life; 
for it regulates not only the religious beliefs and 
practices of every good Mohammedan, but his 
lawful relations with his neighbors and _ his 
obligations toward the state which is in theory 
made up of the whole community or brotherhood 
of Mohammedans. But Mohammed himself was 
illiterate, which in the East does not necessarily 
mean unlearned, and as these successive revela-_ 
tions, of which he dictated the exact tenor immedi- 
ately after each one had been vouchsafed to him, 
covered the twenty-three years of his career as a 
prophet and conformed to the many important 
changes which his views underwent during that 
period, the Koran itself contains many variations 
of doctrine, sometimes almost contradictory, yet 
all equally immutable. So long as he lived, 
his commanding personality sufficed to reconcile 


[8 } 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


those discrepancies, but after his death it became 
necessary to call in aid the evidence of those 
who had been in closest contact with him, and were 
therefore best qualified to interpret his intentions, 
and their record of his sayings collected under 
the name of Hadith, or Traditions, is second in 
sanctity only to the Koran itself and forms with 
the Koran the whole gospel of orthodox Islamic 
truth. 

Mohammed was undoubtedly a great spiritual 
thinker whose soul revolted against the idol- 
worship and the moral laxity which prevailed 
among his fellow-tribesmen in Arabia. He made 
a stern monotheism the foundation-stone of Islam, 
but in devising a religious, social, and political 
system which should rescue his people from their 
loose heathenism, he had enough worldly wisdom 
not to place any unbearable strain upon their 
inherited habits of life and thought. There is 
nothing in the Koran to show the chronological 
order of the angel Gabriel’s revelations, but it is 
easy to distinguish between those parts of it in 
which Mohammed expresses himself as a religious 
seer and those in which he adapts his visions of 
divine truth to the practical requirements of a 
human polity. Out of that conflict between ideals 
and realities the Mohammedan theocratic state 


19] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


emerged which combines in the same person both 
temporal and spiritual authority. 

The principle of theocracy has been for long 
periods obscured in the vicissitudes of Islamic 
history, but how vital it has always remained we 
have seen once more within the last few years in 
the sudden frenzy which carried away a large 
section of the Mohammedan world in the so-called 
“khalifate movement.” The khalifate itself dates 
back to the death of the prophet. Provision had 
to be made for the maintenance of the temporal 
and spiritual authority vested in him during his 
lifetime, and it was made in the institution of the 
khalifate. The headship of Islam was to be 
perpetuated in a Khalifa-Rassul-Allah, 1.e., vice- 
gerent of the prophet of God, otherwise called 
Imam-el-Kebir, 1.e.. the great guide, or Ameer- 
el-Mouminin, the prince of the faithful. The 
theocratic state which Mohammed had founded 
was then still in its infancy and was centered in 
the Koreish tribe to which he belonged. Though 
he passed away without actually designating 
his successor, his father-in-law, Abu Bekr, was 
immediately recognized as khalif, but he lived 
for only two years, and grave dissensions soon 
arose between those who held that the khalifate 


[ 10 ] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


should be elective and those who favored the 
principle of hereditary succession. 

Concord was maintained under Abu Bekr’s 
next two successors, though neither of them died 
a natural death. Open strife broke out under the 
fourth khalif, Ali, who was a son-in-law of the 
prophet. He was murdered just thirty years 
after the prophet’s death, and the khalifate 
was transferred, by a combination of violence 
and fraud, to the Ommayad dynasty at Damascus. 
One immediate result was the great schism which 
endures to the present day between the followers 
of Ali, who call themselves Shiahs, and the Sunnis 
who, being in a large majority, have claimed ever 
since to represent Mohammedan orthodoxy. 

The history of the khalifate has been a stormy 
one ever since. It was at once repudiated by the 
Shiahs; it lasted only a short time as a universal 
khalifate even of Sunni Islam; it has often been 
claimed simultaneously by different Mohammedan 
sovereigns; it has sometimes dropped almost out 
of sight in the clash of worldly ambitions; but 
its principle as a divinely appointed institution 
has never been openly denied by any Sunni 
Mohammedan state until the Turkish Republic 
proclaimed its abolition a few months ago. 


{i} 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


It was under the early khalifate that Islam 
spread throughout the Orient with an astounding 
rapidity which has no parallel in the history of 
any other of the great world-religions. The small 
band of semi-barbarous Arabs, who rushed forth 
from their desert homelands in the first half of the 
seventh century with the Koran in one hand and 
the sword in the other, carried everything before 
them in an irresistible tide of conquest, until 
within less than a hundred years they had swept 
eastward through Persia to Central Asia and to 
the confines of India, and westward along the 
north coast of Africa across to Spain and into the 
very heart of France. The Occident at last cried 
halt to them, but it was for a time desperately 
hard pressed. Europe had not yet found herself 
after the long succession of barbarian invasions, 
which almost submerged the remnants of the 
ancient civilization of Greece and Rome, and the 
transfer of the seat of occidental empire to 
Constantinople had shifted its center of stability to 
the very outposts of the Orient. The Byzantine 
Empire, however, still held the fort there, and 
the Occident was not wholly defeated nor the 
civilization for which it stood, for in the full 
tide of victory the Arabs came into contact 
with forms of civilization already decaying or still 


{ 12] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


immature, but far more advanced than any that 
Mohammed or his immediate followers ever 
dreamed of. 

The Arabs are a branch of the Semitic race; 
they have fine natural gifts; they are intelligent; 
they are full of imagination; they have a poetic 
temperament which showed itself creative even 
in pre-Mohammedan times, and they have a 
natural aptitude for philosophic speculation. All 
these qualities received a fresh stimulus when the 
sword of Islam opened up to the Arabs vast 
countries in which there lingered the afterglow 
of Persian and Greek and Roman civilizations. 
Even the rigidity of Islamic doctrine seemed for 
a time to yield to new environments. 

In Persia and in the adjacent lands of the Orient 
within the orbit of Persian civilization the Shiah 
heresy predominated and gave rise to a host of 
other heresies deeply imbued with earlier, even 
with Indian, forms of Asiatic mysticism. On the 
eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, 
where Sunni orthodoxy prevailed, the Arabs 
came under the influence of peoples who, however 
degenerate, were the heirs of Greek and Roman 
culture. They easily displaced Christianity, de- 
based and torn by the bitter feuds of Arian and 
Athanasian theologians, or petrified in the hermits’ 


1 13 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


caves of the Syrian and Libyan hills. But the 
opulence and refined luxury of such great cities 
as Alexandria, Damascus, and Antioch appealed 
to the sensuous side of their natures, while their 
speculative turn of mind led them to explore the 
new avenues of philosophic thought which the 
earlier translations of Greek authors into Syriac, 
a language akin to Arabic, opened out before 
them. Differences of creed and complexion were 
attenuated by the intermarriage of the Arab 
conquerors, relatively few in number, with women 
of the subject races. A blend of alien elements 
contributed to the growth of a brilliant and 
cultured Mohammedan society at Damascus 
under the Ommayad khalifate (661-750), and at 
Baghdad under the more somber Abbaside khali- 
fate (750-970), when the ruler seldom appeared 
in public without the executioner at his side—just 
as Flecker shows the khalif Haroun-el-Rashid 
always attended by the sinister figure of Mansur 
in his ““Golden Road to Samarkand.” 
Bloodthirsty tyrants as were many of the 
khalifs, they were also, like the “despots” of the 
Italian Renaissance, generous patrons of art and 
literature, and so keen was the response of the 
Arab mind to the finest minds of Hellas that 
in the reign of Haroun-el-Rashid’s successor, 


[14] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


El-Mamun, Aristotle was translated into Arabic, 
and,in the followingcentury, Ibn Sina, whom we call 
Avicenna, though born in far-away Bokhara and 
of Persian parentage, earned imperishable renown 
for Arab science as a great teacher of medicine 
_as well as of philosophy. 

It was not, however, in the lands belonging 
geographically to the East that Islamic culture 
reached its high-water mark, but in the farthest 
Western lands swept by the tide of Arab victories 
on the actual continent of Europe. With the 
conquest of Spain in the middle of the eighth 
century, the Arabs had become masters of so vast 
an empire that unity neither of religious nor of 
territorial rulership could be maintained. A 
separate khalifate arose at Cordova, contemporary 
with that of Baghdad, and it was there that 
through the intermingling of Mohammedan and 
Christian and Jewish elements the civilization 
which we call Saracenic not only yielded its 
finest fruits but made an enduring and beneficent 
mark on the Occident. For while the darkness 
of the early Middle Ages was settling down upon 
the Christian nations of Europe and they were 
being taught to forget their great inheritance of 
ancient classical learning, it was rescued from 
oblivion by Arab writers of truly encyclopedic 


{15 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


learning—at Cordova and Granada, at Seville 
and Toledo. Mohammedan princes ransacked 
Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad for books both 
old and new for their own libraries, and surrounded 
themselves with philosophers and men of science. 
Now and again the bigots checked the flow of 
enlightenment, but it resumed its undaunted 
course until it spread over every field of learning, 
mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, geography, 
history, metaphysics, and philosophy—above all, 
philosophy. 

It was, however, only after the khalifate of 
Cordova had itself crumbled away that this 
intellectual movement reached full maturity in 
Abdul-Walid Ibn-Rushd, betterknown as Averroes, 
who was born at Cordova in 1126, and enjoyed 
for a long time the protection of the Almohad 
princes. His influence cannot be measured 
even by the immense volume of his writings, 
which almost equals that of his chosen master, 
Aristotle. Averroes was a keen student of medi- 
cine and mathematics, but it was as an indomitable 
seeker after philosophic truth that he found the 
fullest scope for his genius. He claimed to be 
little more than an interpreter of Aristotle, but 
it is hardly too much to say that through him 
Aristotle was reborn into the world. In his own 


{ 16 ] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


lifetime Averroes had to suffer persecution at the 
hands even of his earlier patrons who were driven 
by Mohammedan orthodoxy and popular fanati- 
cism to take alarm at his freedom of thought, 
and soon after his death the narrow bigotry of 
Mohammedan divines killed the new life which he 
had sought to breathe into the dry bones of Islam. 
The rare flower of Saracenic culture wilted even 
before the revival in Spain of a Christianity 
sometimes as fierce and militant as Islam itself 
drove back the Mohammedan conquerors into 
Northwest Africa. But through Averroes the 
torch of learning, which he kept burning at a 
critical period of human history, was handed on 
to Western nations, who without his inspiration 
might have suffered it to perish. 

Trampled under foot during the final decay 
of Mohammedan power in Spain, Averroism, as 
the new school of liberal thought was deservedly 
called after its founder, passed, largely through the 
medium of its Jewish disciples whom Christian as 
well as Mohammedan fanaticism drove out of 
Spain, into the cities of southern France, and 
thence on the one hand to the great Italian 
University of Padua and on the other to Paris 
and Oxford. It was.as fiercely assailed by the 
orthodox dogmatists of Western Christendom 


{17} 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


as it had been by the orthodox dogmatists of Islam. 
But it found many courageous champions, and 
not least among Englishmen. 

Michael Scot journeyed to Toledo at the begin- 
ning of the thirteenth century to study Arabic 
and read the works of Averroes in the master’s 
tongue, and it was he who first published an 
English translation of Aristotle. Later on in the 
same century Roger Bacon expounded Averroes 
to an enthusiastic group of scholars at Oxford as 
the greatest of Aristotelian commentators. Aver- 
roism permeated the long period of travail through 
which philosophy passed in Europe until the 
Renaissance reopened access for European stu- 
dents to the original works of the Greek masters. 
Today, when the Mohammedan world is passing 
through another crisis, it is well to remember 
that there was once at any rate a period of Moham- 
medan enlightenment under Arab hegemony to 
which the civilization of the Occident itself 
owes a deep debt of gratitude. 

Not even during that period, however, was 
there any peace between the Occident and the 
Orient. Christendom, long on the defensive 
against Islam, was passing over to the offensive. 
The same surge of religious revival that gradually 
drove the Arabs out of Spain produced the 


{18 ] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


Crusades, which, with their mingled record of 
heroic other-worldliness and of a squalidly selfish 
this-worldliness, constitute one of the most dra- 
matic but also most disastrous episodes in the 
history of the relations of the Occident and the 
Orient. In so far as they were directed to the re- 
covery of the Holy Land from the Mohammedan 
infidels, they were essentially wars of religion in 
which militant Christendom pitted itself against 
militant Islam. Even the many instances of splen- 
did chivalry, as frequent on the Mohammedan 
as on the Christian side, only fitfully redeemed 
them from the taint of savage fanaticism. From 
this point of view they widened the gulf between 
the Occident and the Orient. On the other 
hand, when the personal ambitions of popes 
and kings deflected the later Crusades from 
their first pious purpose and the Latin Cru- 
saders turned their arms quite as often against 
the rival Christian power at Constantinople as 
against the Mohammedan masters of Jerusalem, 
they ended by weakening the Occident as a whole 
just as it should have been closing up its ranks 
to resist another and almost more formidable 
onslaught from the Orient than that of the early 
Arab conquerors. The Turks had begun to 
sweep down upon Western Asia from their Central 


{ 19 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Asian homelands some time before the First 
Crusade, but the great Seljukide Empire that they 
built up on the ruins of the old Arab khalifates 
had passed away before the last Crusade collapsed 
ignominiously, not in the Holy Land, but on the 
shores of the Black Sea, in a vain attempt to 
arrest the menacing expansion of a much mightier 
Turkish empire than that of the Seljukides. 

The small Turkish clan that was to grow 
up into the Ottoman Empire only crossed the 
Euphrates in the middle of the thirteenth century 
to settle at first on one of the great plateaus of 
Asia Minor, not far from Angora, which is today 
the capital of the new Turkish Republic. Though 
the newcomers had picked up Mohammedanism 
during their wanderings across Asia, they were 
essentially soldiers of fortune ready to hire their 
swords out to the highest bidder, Christian as 
well as Mohammedan. Some took service in 
Asia with the Seljukide Empire, which was already 
tottering to its fall, and some in Europe with the 
Byzantine Empire or with its Christian rivals, 
whether Bulgars or Serbs. They were stout 
fighters, and wherever they went as hired mercena- 
ries they ultimately remained as masters. From 
Othman, the first of their great leaders to proclaim 
himself an independent sovereign in 1295, the 


[ 20 ] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


dynasty and empire which he founded took the 
distinctive name of Ottoman. His son, Orkhan, 
organized his people into a nation in arms whose 
bravery in the field was constantly stimulated by 
the prospect of boundless plunder and slaves 
innumerable. 

The Western Crusaders, turning their eyes away 
from Palestine, tried too late to compose their own 
differences in order to meet the new storm from 
the Orient, and the Byzantine emperor, Cantacu- 
zene, himself preferred to seek safety in giving his 
young daughter, Theodora, in marriage to the 
Ottoman sultan. The Occident, with never a 
leader equal to the emergency, and torn by internal 
dissensions, squandered its forces of resistance, 
and a succession of fighting sultans who had also 
a rough grasp of statesmanship carried their 
empire into Europe, with Adrianople as its 
first European capital, until the capture of Con- 
stantinople in 1452, nine years after the last Cru- 
sade, and installed Mohammed the Conqueror 
in the imperial city which Constantine had 
created. 

The Occident awoke too late to all that the 
fall of Constantinople meant. There was an end 
to the ancient continuity of empire of which the 
tradition had survived the transfer of the seat 


[ 21} 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


of power from Rome to Constantinople. There 
was a new and formidable menace to Christian 
civilization itself not long emerged from the 
twilight of the Dark Ages. It was the triumph 
of Islam over Christendom that Mohammed the 
Conqueror celebrated when he rode his horse 
straight up to the ancient basilica of St. Sophia 
and converted it into a Mohammedan house of 
prayer. He was, it is true, wiser than the Turks 
of our own times, for he realized the value of his 
Christian subjects as an indispensable economic 
asset for purposes both of taxation and production, 
and more or less contemptuously allowed them 
to retain their own communal and ecclesiastical 
organization. He was willing, too, to concede 
certain privileges known as “capitulations”’ to 
the foreign merchants established in the chief 
Turkish seaports. But the conqueror never belied 
the savagery of his Central Asian race. Christian 
heads struck off by his orders adorned his great 
banquet after the capture of the imperial city, 
which was itself handed over to the tender mercies 
of the Turkish soldiery. What they did with it 
we know on the authority of a Turkish historian. 
He says: 


The soldiers thronged into it with joyous hearts, and 
there, seizing the possessors and their families, they made 


[ 22 ] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


the wretched unbelievers weep. They acted in accordance 
with the precept, “Slaughter their aged and capture their 
youth.” 


Then his victorious armies resumed their 
onward march. The Turk’s only real business 
was and always has been war. North and south, 
east and west, the tide of Turkish conquest rolled 
on for another century and more until the bounda- 
ries of the Ottoman Empire, whether under the 
direct rule or merely under the overlordship of 
the sultan, included in Europe not only all those 
states now known as the Balkan states, but the 
Russian littoral of the Black Sea and part of 
Poland and the whole of Hungary, and Austrian 
territory almost up to the gates of Vienna and 
down to the eastern coast of the Adriatic; in Asia, 
the whole of Asia Minor to the borders of Persia 
and the Persian Gulf and Syria and Palestine with 
the Arabian peninsula right away to the Indian 
Ocean; and in Africa, the whole of Egypt and the 
coastlands of Tripoli and Tunis and Algiers to 
the borders of Morocco on the southern shores 
of the Mediterranean. 

The Ottoman armies seemed to be invincible 
on land, and alone among oriental nations Turkey 
developed a naval power which for a time almost 


dominated the Mediterranean. The Turkish flood 
{ 23 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


rolling in from the east was as grave a threat to 
the very existence of Western Christendom in 
the sixteenth century as, in the eighth century, 
the Arab flood that poured from the south across 
the Pyrenees into the very heart of France— 
indeed, a still graver threat, for the Arabs had 
known not only how to conquer but how to evolve 
a great civilization, whereas the Turks were 
conquerors and nothing more, who carried with 
them everywhere the gross atmosphere of the 
armed camp. 

Sultan Selim the Grim, the conqueror of Egypt, 
had perhaps some higher vision when he sought to 
graft on to the immense temporal power of the 
Ottoman sultanate the spiritual power of the 
Islamic khalifate, and brought back with him to 
Constantinople, in 1517, the mantle of the 
prophet and the rest of the insignia which had 
remained in the possession of one of the descend- 
ants of the Abbaside dynasty of Baghdad who 
had fled to Cairo and still bore there, under the 
Mameluke sultans of Egypt, the title, though 
little more than an empty one, of khalif. Hence- 
forth the Ottoman sultans assumed that title, 
which none had hitherto ventured to claim who 
could not at least pretend to trace back his descent 
to theArabian prophet. Their right to it was never 


{ 24 } 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


universally recognized by orthodox Mohammedans 
in other countries or by other Mohammedan sover- 
eigns, except as a matter of occasional political 
expediency or of mere courtesy. But from that 
time the titular leadership of Islam passed finally 
from a higher to a lower race, from the Arab to 
the Turk. 

Under Selim’s son, Soliman the Magnificent, 
the sinister growth of the Ottoman Empire 
reached its climax. He was the last of its great 
sultans, the tenth in succession from Othman, 
and at his death in 1566 it entered abruptly 
upon its decline, which was almost as rapid as 
had been its rise. Henceforth, with rare excep- 
tions, the power passed for nearly two centuries 
under his feeble and depraved successors into the 
Seraglio whence sultanas and concubines misruled 
the Empire through corrupt and incompetent 
favorites, shamelessly raised to the highest offices 
of state. The heirs to the throne were brought up 
in what was called the “Cage,” where, if they 
were not sooner or later put to death, they were 
deliberately debauched and emasculated, in order 
that, if and when they ascended the throne, they 
should be mere helpless puppets in the hands of 
the dominant faction. Those who survived exerted 
whatever energy was left to them on their acces- 


{ 25 J 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


sion in killing off their brothers or other members 
of their family who, so long as they lived, might 
be deemed potential rivals. 

The Janissaries were almost the only check 
upon the Seraglio. Levied from the Christian 
subject races who had to give up their first-born 
sons to be brought up as Mohammedans for the 
military service of the Empire, they had been the 
corps a élite of the Ottoman Army during the long 
period of unbroken victory. But in the hour of 
its decay they degenerated into a treacherous 
Praetorian guard ready to sell its support to 
anybody who could afford to purchase it. When 
war no longer meant new kingdoms to be delivered 
over to their predatory instincts, the Turkish 
armies in the field, led by generals as corrupt and 
incompetent as the Seraglio favorites who ap- 
pointed them, ceased to be invincible, and after their 
last assault upon Vienna had been repelled in 
1683 by the gallantry of the king of Poland, 
John Sobiesky, the European frontiers of Turkey 
receded almost continuously after each disastrous 
campaign, while anarchy spread throughout the 
provinces under increasing misrule, and the 
Christian subject races themselves awoke out 
of the lethargy of prolonged enslavement to a 
returning sense of national consciousness. 


{ 26 } 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


Toward the end of the eighteenth century 
the progress of disintegration had already gone so 
far that the French ambassador in Constantinople 
wrote to his government describing the Turk 
as a “sick man” for whose inheritance the 
European powers should provide without delay. 
The phrase soon came into common use, but it 
was premature mainly because the European 
powers could not agree among themselves as to 
the distribution of the Turk’s inheritance. The 
relations of the Orient and the Occident were 
however entering into a new phase. As the 
menace of Arab Islam to medieval Europe had 
passed away, so also did the menace of Turkish 
Islam to modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire 
lived on to be in its decrepitude a dangerous 
temptation to rival European ambitions as a 
bone of contention and more than once a cause 
of war between the great powers. 

With this phase I shall deal on another occa- 
sion. I will conclude today by recalling the one 
great service which the rise of the Ottoman 
Empire rendered to the world, lest perhaps you 
should grow impatient of a story which may 
seem to have nothing to do with America. It has, 
in fact, everything to do with America, for in 
far-away Asia, the Turk, quite unwittingly, 


1 27 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


precipitated at least one great event, and a most 
vital one, in your history, namely, the discovery 
of this great continent. It happened in this way. 
The ancient Greeks who covered Asia Minor with 
their colonies and the Romans whose Empire at 
its apogee stretched far into Asia, carried on a 
considerable overland trade with the more distant 
regions of the Orient; and in the Middle Ages 
Genoa and Venice derived much of their wealth and 
power from the valuable commerce which Europe 
still maintained with Eastern lands across the Medi- 
terranean. When the Ottoman Empire grew up, 
it blocked one by one the old Asian land routes of 
European trade with the Orient, and its corsairs 
even made access to them across the Mediterranean 
impossible or at least very risky. But Europe 
was not to be balked. The Western nations with 
an Atlantic seaboard began to turn their eyes 
toward the boundless horizon of the Atlantic, and 
Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus 
and other hardy navigators launched their frail 
craft upon the unexplored ocean and opened up 
new highways to a new world. 

The Spaniards and the Portuguese were the 
first to make the great adventure, and they made 
it in the sole hope of discovering a new trade route 
across the seas to the legendary wealth of the 


{ 28 ] 


THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND 


Indies. Columbus himself was in quest of the 
Indies when he stumbled upon America, and he 
indeed imagined that he had reached the Indies 
when, as it turned out, he was landing on a 
brand-new continent. Hence for some time the 
Spaniards and the Portuguese, who were the 
pioneers of ocean navigation, called both North 
and South America “Las Indias,” and their 
delusion has been preserved in the name “Indians,” 
which the aboriginal races of this continent still 
bear, as well as in that of the West Indies, the 
group of islands still under the British flag in the 
Caribbean Sea. Indeed, the discovery of America 
did not divert the resolute navigators of Western 
Europe from their original search for an ocean 
route to India. 

While after their first great achievements the 
Spaniards applied themselves chiefly to tightening 
their hold upon Central and Southern America, 
the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope 
and landed on the western shores of India. By 
the time the English followed in their wake, the 
Turkish conquest of Egypt had closed the last of 
the old avenues of European trade with the East 
which the Mameluke sultans of Cairo, so long 
as they were independent of Constantinople, had 
allowed to remain open for the sake of the enor- 


[ 29 J 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


mous tolls they levied upon it in transit across 
Egypt. 

It was, like Columbus, with the hope of reach- 
ing India that John Cabot first sailed from England 
across the Atlantic, in the last years of the fifteenth 
century, and merely discovered Newfoundland. 
Not until Sir Walter Raleigh, as a graceful compli- 
ment to Queen Elizabeth, gave the name of 
Virginia to a large tract of country in North 
America, did his fellow-countrymen’s eyes begin 
to turn with no less curiosity to the new continent 
of America than to the legendary shores of India. 
Then and for nearly two centuries the history of 
the early British colonies in North America was 
closely bound up with that of the early British 
settlements in India. 

Of all this the Turk was blissfully unaware. 
He understood nothing about economic pressure. 
He believed only in the power of his sword. The 
vast Empire which his sword conquered has passed 
away, but the great historical fact remains that, 
when his sword closed to Western trade its old 
rights of way to the Orient, it was he who drove 
Europe to discover America just when she did, and 
to call in the New World to redress the balance of 
the Old more than three centuries before Canning 
uttered his famous phrase just a century ago. 


[ 30 } 


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THE PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN 
EMPIRE 


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THE PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN 
EMPIRE 


The chief innovation in the domain of inter- 
national relations during the nineteenth century 
was the assertion of the principle of nationality 
le. of the right of peoples to group themselves 
according to their ethnical and ethical affinities 
into independent political entities or states. After 
long struggles with the old principles of paramount 
dynastic interests exalted at the Congress of Vienna 
in 1815 and in the Holy Alliance, the principle of 
nationality won through in Europe in the unifica- 
tion of Italy and of Germany, as it had already 
won through in the successful revolt of the Spanish 
and Portuguese dominions in South America, and 
as it won through also in the preservation of the 
North American union in this great Republic, 
though at the cost of a terrible Civil War. 

From the very beginning of the nineteenth 
century the same principle began also to affect 
very profoundly the relations between the Occident 
and the Orient, with the decay of the old Ottoman 


{ 33 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Empire built up on the destruction of whole nations, 
and with the reawakening of the Christian sub- 
ject races in European Turkey. Pitiful remnants 
of the medieval Occident, they had been mangled 
for centuries under the Turkish harrow, but their 
spark of life had never been wholly extinguished. 
The Turkish hand had been heavy upon them, 
and every family had to surrender a son to be 
brought up as a Mohammedan for military service 
in the corps of Janissaries, but they had collectively 
retained their own faith. It was in the interests 
of the ruling race to conserve the Christian 
communities as hewers of wood and drawers of 
water. There was a limit under the Sacred 
Law to the taxation which could be imposed 
upon the sultan’s Mohammedan subjects; there 
was none to the taxation of his Christian sub- 
jects. 

So the Christians had been allowed to preserve 
their churches and their priests, their separate 
languages and their ancient folksongs, and with 
them some things of their national soul. The 
vast majority belonged to the Eastern or Orthodox 
church, and for this reason Russia, who was of 
the same communion, was the first great European 
power to take a not altogether unselfish interest 
in their fate. 


[ 34 | 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


In the eighteenth century Catherine the Great 
at war with Turkey openly proclaimed herself 
the champion of the orthodox Christian popula- 
tions of the Balkan peninsula, and the partition 
of European Turkey was mooted between Russia, 
Prussia, and Austria and only postponed because 
they found it easier for the time being to satisfy 
their ambition by the partition of Poland. The 
French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, 
which convulsed the whole European continent, 
sent a fresh thrill of hope through the Balkan 
peoples. To the Serbs belongs the honor of 
having been the first to rise in open rebellion in 
1805 against their Turkish masters, and, though 
their heroic struggle ended in temporary failure, 
they blazed the trail for others. When the 
Greeks in their turn rose, they had this advantage, 
that their cause appealed directly to all those who 
remembered what Western civilization owed to 
ancient Greece. 

In spite of many cross-currents that favored 
Turkey, the most staggering blow since Lepanto 
was dealt to Turkish naval power when the com- 
bined fleets of England, France, and Russia under 
Admiral Codrington destroyed the Turkish fleet 
in Greek waters at Navarino in 1820; but only 
after a Russian army had entered Adrianople in 


135] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


1829 did Turkey recognize the Hellenic kingdom 
as the first independent state carved out of her 
dominions in the Balkan peninsula. And let me 
say here straightway with regard not only to 
Greece, but also to Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania 
—all Slav Balkan states carved out of European 
Turkey—that with all the grave shortcomings 
of their rulers and their peoples, there is not one 
that on its record taken as a whole has failed to 
justify its emancipation. Nobody who had an 
opportunity of comparing conditions in those 
countries before the Balkan wars with the condi- 
tion of the provinces then still under Turkish rule 
could for a moment question the social and 
intellectual and economic strides which they had 
made since their liberation. They were nations 
instinct with life, whilst the dead hand of Turkey 
still weighed heavily on every people still subject — 
to the Ottoman sultans. 

When at the end of the Greek war of independ- 
ence the Ottoman Empire seemed to be at the last 
gasp, it received a fresh lease of life from Anglo- 
Russian rivalry, henceforth until nearly the end 
of the nineteenth century the dominant factor in 
the relations between the Occident and the Orient. 
Russia was known to have long cast covetous 
eyes upon Constantinople, which she significantly 


I 36 } 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


called Tsargrad, the city of the Eastern Caesars, 
to whom the Russian czars claimed mystic 
heirship. 

This was a claim into which British statesmen 
had some excuse for reading a dangerous challenge 
to British power in Asia as well as in Europe. 
They remembered the plans discussed between 
Napoleon and Alexander I at Tilsit for a joint 
invasion of India across Persia by Russian and 
French armies, and they scented in Russia’s 
expansion at the cost of Turkey a definite menace 
to India on her northwest land frontier which 
British supremacy at sea could not by itself 
avail to counter. Moreover, British naval power 
was being confronted with new and difficult 
problems. Steam navigation was promising to 
open up quicker lines of communication with 
India through the Mediterranean and the Red 
Sea than round the Cape of Good Hope, and the 
safety of the new overland route across Egypt 
would, it was felt, be gravely imperiled if the 
eastern Mediterranean came to be dominated by 
a great European power intrenched at Constanti- 
nople and on the straits. 

This danger could no longer be regarded as 
remote when the revolt, for a long time victorious, 


of the great pasha of Egypt, Mohamed Ali, 
137] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


against his Turkish overlord suddenly threatened 
to disrupt the Turkish Empire and led Russia 
to show her own hand somewhat prematurely. 
For, on the plea of protecting the Turkish capital 
against the rapid advance of the Egyptian armies, 
Czar Nicolas I made haste, in 1833, to land large 
Russian forces at Constantinople, and he only 
withdrew them, under strong diplomatic pressure 
from the rest of Europe, after he had wrung from 
the sultan the Treaty of Ungkiar Skelessi, which, 
had Russia been allowed to carry it into effect, 
would have meant placing the whole Ottoman 
Empire under a virtual Russian protectorate. 
Apart from that treaty the special title which 
the Czar claimed to the protection of the 
sultan’s Christian subjects as fellow-members of 
the same Christian communion could still be 
pressed at any moment, and to much the same 
purpose. 

Was there any other way of averting this 
menace than by constraining Turkey to put her 
house in order and deprive Russia of her excuse 
for interference in a reformed Ottoman Empire? 
This was at any rate the policy urged upon British 
ministers by a masterful ambassador at Constanti- 
nople, Sir Stratford Canning, who had watched 
the tortuous methods of Russian diplomacy at 


[ 38 ] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


close quarters, and was honestly convinced that 
there might yet be time to make Turkey mend her 
ways and convert her, with British support, into 
a solid bulwark against further encroachments of 
Russian power in the East, either toward Constan- 
tinople or toward India. Canning’s policy postu- 
lated, of course, the maintenance of the territorial 
integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and was therefore 
in direct conflict with Russian policy which aimed 
at its destruction, either by direct action, or by 
promoting under her aegis the rise of independent 
Christian states, to be carved, as the Hellenic 
kingdom had already been, out of the Turkish 
dominions in Europe. 

The czar Nicolas had vast ambitions, but they 
were not directed merely toward the material 
agerandizement of his Empire. He believed him- 
self to be specially charged with the providential 
mission of removing from the map of Europe 
the incurable plague spot which he, and many 
Englishmen too, saw Turkey to be. But he pro- 
fessed himself ready to seek, in the fulfilment of 
his mission, the co-operation of other powers, and 
even of Great Britain, the only other European 
power that already had, like Russia, a great stake 
in the Orient. Twice, in 1844 and 1853, he made 
overtures to British ministers, with every appear- 


1 39} 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


ance of sincerity and on not ungenerous terms, for 
a final partition of the Ottoman Empire, which he 
at least was convinced would never mend its ways, 
and must therefore be ended once and for all. 

It is idle to speculate on what might have 
happened if Britain had entertained those over- 
tures. But suspicion of Russia was too deep 
seated, and they were rejected. It was the part- 
ing of the ways, and England took what many 
Englishmen, including myself, have long since 
held to have been the wrong turning. Only a 
few years later she found herself fighting the 
Crimean War against Russia and in defense of 
Turkey, and, when it was over and Russia tempo- 
rarily defeated, the Ottoman Empire was solemnly 
admitted by the Paris Treaty of 1856 into the 
“comity of civilized nations.” 

This was a theatrical transformation scene in 
the relations between the Occident and the Orient, 
but nothing more. Another two decades showed 
the Turk to be as incorrigible as ever. The only 
thing that the Turkish ruler had learned was how 
to borrow and squander huge sums of money which 
European financiers were willing to lend him as 
soon as he had been welcomed into the comity 
of civilized nations. All his promises of reforms 
remained a dead letter. 


{ 40 } 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


When in the seventies rebellion broke out in 
various Christian provinces of European Turkey, 
the customary methods of repression were em- 
ployed as of old and culminated in the Bulgarian 
atrocities of 1876. The powers were agreed that the 
Turkish situation had become intolerable but they 
could not agree upon the remedy. They held a 
great conference at Constantinople at the end of 
1876 which ended in failure. Then the czar, Alex- 
ander II, took the law into his own hands, and 
early in 1878 his armies stood at the gates of 
the. Turkish capital. 

Once more the old fear of Russian ascendancy 
drove Britain to the verge of war in order to save 
Turkey. In spite of Gladstone’s fiery crusade 
against Turkish misrule, Disraeli, who was then 
British prime minister, carried the country with 
him in crying halt to Russia, and in view of the 
imminence of war Indian troops were brought 
as far as Malta. Orientals had already often 
fought side by side with Europeans against other 
Europeans on eastern battlefields, but never be- 
fore had it been proposed to array them against 
Europeans on European battlefields. This was 
a new and momentous precedent, though on that 
occasion the Indian troops never went beyond 
Malta. Russia could not afford to embark on 


{ 41 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


another war, and after having imposed upon the 
beaten Turk the Treaty of San Stefano, which 
would have liberated the greater part of European 
Turkey from the Ottoman yoke, she agreed to 
have it referred to a Congress at Berlin which 
whittled down its most important provisions and 
restored large areas to Turkish rule. 

Turkey was, indeed, bound over to reorganize 
her bankrupt finances, and besides the customary 
promises to introduce large administrative reforms 
in all the provinces, she was specially pledged in 
regard to her Asiatic provinces to Great Britain 
who undertook to defend them against external 
ageression under a secret agreement by which the 
sultan handed over to her the island of Cyprus 
save for the retention of his nominal sovereignty 
and a fixed portion of revenue. 

But the powers claimed no direct control over 
the execution of the reforms, and though a watchful 
eye was to be kept upon them by their ambassadors 
at Constantinople, their angles of vision were 
apt to be very different, and in the person of 
Abdul Hamid a new sultan was now on the throne 
whose sinister statesmanship soon broke up the 
so-called “Concert of Europe.” 

Even before Selim the Grim’s conquest of 
Egypt, the Ottoman sultans had sometimes 


{ 42 ] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


boastfully called themselves khalifs, though it is 
from his reign that the Turkish khalifate is 
generally held to date. But until the latter part 
of the nineteenth century his successors had made 
very little capital out of the spiritual authority 
which that title implied. Selim died too soon, and 
his immediate successor, Soliman the Magnificent, 
was too much absorbed in the European wars of 
conquest which filled his long reign. After him 
the power of the sultans passed to the Seraglio, 
and that was not an atmosphere in which much 
thought was given to spiritual authority. 

More recently, when, in the middle of the 
nineteenth century, Turkish statesmen under 
British influence were trying to fit a modern 
facade on to the decaying Empire, they were so 
anxious to affect European usages and to dissemble 
the old oriental Adam that the ruler of Turkey 
preferred for a time to adopt in international 
treaties the title not of “sultan,” and still less of 
“khalif,” but of “emperor” of the Ottomans, 
which at least sounded more occidental. Abdul 
Hamid II, whom a succession of palace tragedies 
had put on the throne in 1876 just before the 
Russo-Turkish War, was the first to turn the 
khalifate to practical account. When he was a 
youth, a pious fakir, who claimed to have dis- 


[ 43 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


covered his star in the heavens, prophesied to him 
that he was destined to revive the ancient glory 
of Islam as sultan and khalif. Perhaps it was in 
remembrance of that prophecy that he called 
his new palace Yeldiz Kiosk, or the “pavilion of | 
the star,’ and he was at any rate determined to 
remind the world that he was khalif as well as 
sultan, and that he meant to seek in the exercise 
of his spiritual sovereignty as khalif substantial 
compensation for the curtailment of territorial 
sovereignty which infidel Europe had inflicted 
upon him as sultan. 

It was a bold reversion to the original con- 
ception of Islamic theocracy, and one cannot deny 
a certain element of greatness both to the concep- 
tion itself and to the systematic if ruthless deter- 
mination with which he labored to carry it into 
effect. His first care was to restore the autocratic 
power of the sultanate. He quickly rid himself 
of the paper constitution which Midhat Pasha 
had devised, chiefly, it must be said, in order to 
throw dust in the eyes of Europe, and banished 
its author into Arabia, where he conveniently 
died of a cup of coffee. He broke up the old 
Turkish bureaucratic ring which for two or three 
generations had ruled or misruled the Empire 
from the offices of the Sublime Porte at Stamboul, 


[ 44 ] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


and he made his palace, from which he seldom 
ventured forth even into the streets of his capital, 
the one center of government from which his 
immediate orders traveled, often over the heads 
of ministers and governors, to the most distant 
parts of his dominions and to his carefully selected 
representatives and agents abroad. 

The first public intimation of the new Pan- 
Islamic policy by which he hoped to rally the 
whole Mohammedan world around the Turkish 
khalifate was the appointment in 1881 of a Tuni- 
sian as grand vizier, and he emphasized its signifi- 
cance by declaring in the firman of appointment 
that as khalif he had the right to claim the services 
of all orthodox Mohammedans throughout the 
worldof Islam. I wasin Constantinople at the time 
and well remember what a sensation it produced 
among all the old Turkish officials who looked upon 
the grand vizierate as part of their monopoly. 

It was not among his own slow-witted Turkish 
people that Abdul Hamid meant to look for the 
instruments of a policy ranging far beyond his 
temporal dominions. He surrounded himself at 
Yeldiz with Arab Syrians and Kurds and Albanians 
who were his secretaries and confidants and spies, 
and even the garrison at Constantinople that 
watched over his safety was composed of regiments 


[45 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


drawn mainly from the non-Turkish Mohammedan 
races of his Empire. Like a spider in his web 
he spun from Yeldiz an ever expanding web of 
Pan-Islamic propaganda which carried his fame 
as sultan and khalif among Mohammedans far 
and near, and especially among those whose 
loyalty to their alien rulers he hoped to shake as 
a means of large political reprisal. It was his 
good fortune ultimately to enlist the support of 
one great European potentate. 

Germany had stepped into England’s shoes at 
Constantinople after Lord Salisbury had come 
at last to the conclusion that in backing Turkey 
we had backed the wrong horse. But so long as 
Bismarck was in power German influence at 
Constantinople was exerted mainly for the purpose 
of warding off a conflict between Russia and 
Austria which might have compelled him to take 
sides with the one or the other power—the very 
thing he most dreaded having to do. William II, 
on the contrary, saw in Turkey Germany’s bridge 
head to world-dominion, and his first quarrel 
with Bismarck arose when the old chancellor re- 
plied to him that in his political dictionary there 
was no such term as “‘world-dominion.”’ 

Bismarck fell, and a few years afterward, in 
1898, William II, throwing his mantle over 


{ 46 | 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


Turkey, was the first and only Christian sovereign 
to hail Abdul Hamid, in his famous speech at 
Damascus; as) ““his’ friend and * ally : whom 
300,000,000 Mohammedans throughout the world 
revere as their khalif.”” This effusive demonstra- 
tion, only a few days after the German emperor 
had been masquerading as a crusader at Jerusalem, 
was particularly precious to Abdul Hamid, for 
the Armenian massacres had just then sent a 
thrill of horror through the Western World. 

Abdul Hamid was no fanatic; he often showed 
a great personal liking for individual Europeans 
and for many European customs. He had even 
a taste for European music and drama and built 
himself a private theater in the grounds of Yeldiz. 
He was an adroit diplomatist and could knock 
the heads of the European ambassadors together 
in order to set the concert of Europe at logger- 
heads, but he would make up for it at once 
by lavishing the most delicate attentions upon 
them and still more upon their wives. But 
in matters of policy he had no bowels of compunc- 
tion. 

He was pledged by treaty to introduce far- 
reaching reforms into his Armenian provinces, but 
what would the Islamic world say if the khalif 
were to grant equality to one of his Christian 


{ 47] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


subject races? These Christian subject races 
had already disintegrated his Empire in Europe. 
Were the Armenians to disintegrate his Empire in 
Asia? He could see no practical solution that 
would rid him of the noxious Armenian question 
except to get rid of the Armenians themselves, 
and he felt he could defy the judgment of all other 
civilized nations if the German emperor stood by 
him in his shining armor. William II was quite 
satisfied with the bargain. He got his Baghdad 
Railway Concession and many others, besides the 
congenial privilege of reorganizing the Turkish 
Army under German officers. 

Abdul Hamid continued to misrule despotically 
his own long-suffering people and intermittently 
to kill off his Armenians whenever occasion offered, 
while he built with German help his Hejaz 
Railway to the Holy Places of Arabia, which was 
certainly the finest bit of Pan-Islamic propaganda 
he ever did, as agents from Yeldiz perambulated 
the whole Mohammedan world to collect subscrip- 
tions for that pious work and to sing the praises 
of the great khalif and sultan who was its author. 

But he had turned his own people against him 
by an inquisitional system of government work- 
ing chiefly through corruption and delation. No 
one was safe whom his legions of spies chose to 


{ 48 ] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


denounce as disloyal, and disaffection was equally 
rife in the army, which he had always dreaded 
and kept at arm’s length. 

The Turkish revolution of 1908-1909 began as 
a military revolt, but it ended by placing in power 
a committee known as the Union and Progress 
Committee, which was composed not only of 
revolted officers, but of a younger generation of 
Turkish civilians, many of whom had spent years 
in exile and had caught up some of the catchwords 
at least of Western democracy and freedom of 
thought. Religion sat very lightly upon them, 
and some of them were not even Mohammedans, 
but Jews and crypto-Jews from Salonica, which 
had long been a hotbed of disaffection. 

Under Abdul Hamid’s semi-imbecile successor, 
a brother whom he had kept a state prisoner for 
. thirty years in a gilded cage, members of the 
Union and Progress Committee were the real 
rulers of Turkey. The Occident hailed in them 
at first the advent of a new era in the Orient, and 
in Turkey itself all Ottomans, irrespective of 
creed and race, celebrated a short, delirious honey- 
moon to the tune of “Liberty, Justice, and Frater- 
nity.” Even during the honeymoon, however, 
the Turks carefully eschewed the word “equality,” 
and the Union and Progress men soon began to 


1 49 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


display the cloven hoof of their new Turkish 
nationalism, which they enforced almost as ruth- 
lessly upon Mohammedan non-Turkish as upon 
Christian subject races. Their dream was to 
build up a great Turkish state which should 
include all the peoples of northern Persia and 
Afghanistan and Central Asia with whom the 
Turk could claim to have or to have had at any 
time in history some racial or linguistic affinity. 
This was known as the Pan-Turanian movement 
of which Enver Pasha was to become the chief 
apostle during the Great War. 

Meanwhile, Pan-Islamism receded into the 
background. But it was too useful a second 
string to be given up altogether, especially when 
the Italian invasion of Tripoli in 1911 and the 
Balkan Wars of 1912-13 gave the Young Turks 
a plausible excuse for appealing to the sympathies 
of the whole Mohammedan Orient against the 
European powers who, with the one exception of 
Germany, were denounced as conspiring to crush 
Turkey as the last bulwark of Islam. Even 
Germany’s attitude sometimes perplexed the 
Young Turks, but William II always knew how 
to humor them and retain their affections against 
“the day” which he had long foreseen when 
Turkey’s fourteen army corps would provide 


[ 50] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


a valuable adjunct to the great Germanic 
armies. 

When the Young Turks dragged their country © 
into the Great War at Germany’s heels, they 
made one desperate attempt to turn the Turkish 
khalifate to account. In the name of the khalif, 
a Fehad, or “holy war,” was proclaimed against 
the Allies. It helped, perhaps, in Turkey itself 
to create a proper atmosphere for resuming on an 
unprecedented scale the Hamidian policy of 
exterminating the Christian populations, but it 
fell completely flat amongst the Mohammedans 
outside the Turkish Empire, who seemed to realize 
that it was something of a paradox for Turkey 
to proclaim a holy war against infidels when she 
was herself in alliance with other infidels. 

Indian and French Mohammedan troops 
fought loyally on the Western front against the 
Germans, and, still more significant, Indians and 
even Egyptians fought equally well against their 
Turkish co-religionists on the Suez Canal, in 
Syria, and in Mesopotamia. 

For our knowledge of what happened in Turkey 
during the Great War we are indebted largely to 
many brave American missionaries in the interior, 
and to Morgenthau, the United States ambassador 
in Constantinople, while Lord Bryce, whose 


[ 51} 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


memory is still I think as much honored on 
your side as on our side of the Atlantic applied — 
himself to collect the overwhelming mass of 
evidence on which he framed for the British 
Parliament his formidable indictment of Turkish 
savagery. 

The outstanding features were the wholesale 
massacres and mass deportations, scarcely less 
deadly, which were deliberately and systematically 
carried out in 1915-16 throughout the principal 
Armenian districts of Asia Minor by the Turkish 
military and civil authorities under Enver, the 
minister of war, and Talaat, the minister of 
the interior. Compared with such atrocities, the 
brutality of the Turks toward British prisoners 
of war is a minor matter, but Englishmen cannot 
easily forget that nearly 50 per cent of them 
perished in consequence of Turkish callousness 
and ill-treatment. Throughout the Empire, cor- 
ruption and misrule surpassed all records, and 
while Enver, who, though commander-in-chief, 
did not shrink from starving the Turkish armies 
in order to fill his own pockets, and Talaat and 
the rest battened at Constantinople on state 
plunder, famine and epidemics devastated the 
civil population throughout the whole length 
and breadth of the country. 


{ 52} 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


By the time the Turks sued for an armistice 
in October, 1918, we have it on the authority of 
the American Relief Committee that a quarter 
of the whole population of the Ottoman Empire 
had perished since 1914 from war casualties, 
disease, starvation, and massacre. 

Most of the war leaders fled as soon as they 
saw the game was up, and the new Turkish 
government was quite prepared to accept the 
penalties of defeat. Had the Allies imposed 
their terms of peace at once, they would have been 
accepted even had they been as severe as those 
which were embodied two years later in the 
abortive Treaty of Sévres. The war aims of the 
Allies had been repeatedly proclaimed. Turkey 
was to be banished from Europe, and if Constanti- 
nople itself was not to go to Greece, with the rest 
of Thrace, it was to become a free city under 
international control. In Asia Minor, Smyrna 
and the surrounding region, in which the Greek 
population undoubtedly predominated, was to 
form an autonomous province. The remnants 
of the Armenian people were to be gathered into 
an independent Armenian state, the Arab provinces 
were to be permanently detached from Turkey, 
and a drastic control established over the whole 
Turkish administration in order to make all 


153] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


subject races and the Turkish people themselves 
safe against any renewal of the worst forms of 
Turkish oppression. 

But the long delays of Allied diplomacy and 
the revival of European jealousies, and, more 
indirectly, America’s withdrawal into her own 
shell after the Treaty of Versailles, gave Turkey 
breathing time and allowed Mustapha Kemal, 
one of the few Turkish generals who had earned 
the respect of his adversaries during the war, to 
reorganize the Turkish armies and get Turkey, 
though heavily beaten in the first round, into 
condition to fight a second round as soon as a 
Greek army landed in Asia Minor. 

There have been many lamentable pages in 
the long history of the relations between the 
Occident and the Orient on which the bankruptcy 
of occidental statesmanship has been writ large, 
but none more lamentable than those on which 
will stand forever recorded in the blood of 
hundreds of thousands of innocent victims the 
failure of Western statesmanship in the Near 
East during the five years that followed the end 
of the Great War. Things might have been very 
different had America with her fine record of 
educational and cultural activities in Turkey been 
willing to undertake mandatory responsibilities 


54] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


in Armenia or even in the Arab lands detached 
from the Ottoman Empire, but for reasons which 
it might be unseemly for me to criticize on this 
occasion, she declined, and with that decision 
which I may at any rate be permitted to deplore, 
her responsibility begins and ends. 

Not so the responsibility of the European 
powers concerned, and painful as it is to me to 
have to admit it, the heaviest responsibility of all 
must rest on my own country. It was the British 
armies and the British fleets that had broken the 
power of Turkey. Not only did we hold Syria 
and Mesopotamia, but Constantinople and the 
chief strategic points of Asia Minor had passed 
into British hands immediately after the Armistice. 

I was attached to the British delegation at the 
Paris Peace Conference, and there among those who 
had any knowledge of the East was no one who 
could fail to realize the urgency of imposing the 
Allied peace terms upon Turkey while we were 
still in a position to enforce them. 

But Lloyd George knew better. Someone had 
told him that the East was never in a hurry and 
that Turkey could wait. So for reasons of internal 
policy and to meet the popular clamor for demobili- 
zation and retrenchment, the greater part of the 
British forces were withdrawn and French and 


[55] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Italian troops were invited to take their place 
and supply the material pressure which we were 
no longer prepared to maintain. 

Far be it from me to excuse the part which 
the French and the Italians subsequently played 
in parleying with the Turks on their own account 
and in what they with incredible folly deemed to 
be their own national interests. But had we 
ourselves shown greater steadfastness in holding 
the fort, our allies would never have been given 
the opportunity to succumb to the temptation 
offered to them by proximity to the Turkish 
Empire. 

Similarly, with the landing of the Greek armies 
in Asia Minor, Lloyd George was at last com- 
pelled to recognize what was to be the outcome 
of his strange notion that Turkey could wait. 
The Greek troops landed, it is true, in the first 
instance at the joint invitation of the three Allied 
Powers, but that the invitation was issued at 
Lloyd George’s instance has never been in doubt. 
It is also clear that even when at a later date the 
British government joined with the French and 
Italian governments in advising Greece to with- 
draw her forces from Asia Minor and proclaiming 
their neutrality should Greece persevere in a 
military adventure which they professed equally 


{ 56 | 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


to condemn, Lloyd George continued with 
strange levity to hold a language which the 
Greeks could not construe otherwise than as a 
direct encouragement to disregard the advice 
officially given to them—a language which, 
whatever his intentions may have been, directly 
contributed to the final disaster. 

Unless the Allies, and more especially England, 
were prepared to see the Greeks through, the 
landing of the Greek Army in Asia Minor was 
unquestionably a most dangerous challenge to 
Turkish racial pride. Then, too, and only then, 
was a considerable part of the Mohammedan 
world which had remained almost entirely indiffer- 
ent to the fate of Turkey during the Great War 
suddenly seized with an overwhelming anxiety 
as to the terms to be imposed upon her. Nowhere, 
as I shall show on another occasion, was the excite- 
ment greater than among Indian Mohammedans, 
who professed to see in the policy of the Allied 
Powers, and more especially of Britain, an attack 
upon the Turkish khalifate and therefore upon 
the Mohammedan religion. It was a_ belated 
revival of Hamidian Pan-Islamism. The Turks 
naturally played up to it. But the Graeco- 
Turkish conflict in itself had nothing to do with 
the question of the Turkish khalifate, which was 


157] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


not even mentioned in the national pact in which 
the Grand National Assembly embodied its 
challenge to the Allied Powers. 

It was not so much a religious as a racial war 
which revived and fired to white heat the fierce 
nationalism of a ruling race who still regarded all 
Greeks as mere rebels, to be expelled and extermi- 
nated as such, not on any purely religious ground, 
but on the same grounds of high policy on which 
Abdul Hamid had determined to root out the 
Armenians. 

One has only to look at what happened at 
Angora after the Turks had smashed the Greek 
armies and turned the essentially Greek city of 
Smyrna into an ash-heap as a proof of their 
victory. The British forces at Chanak on the 
Asiatic side of the straits and at Constantinople 
prevented a Turkish rush across to Thrace. 
But the Turks nevertheless got their own terms 
before the Mudania Convention brought hostilities 
to a close on October 11, 1922. 

Then, to use a trivial phrase, Mustapha Kemal 
and the new Turkey represented in the Grand 
National Assembly gave the show away. For it 
became evident that they had merely exploited 
both the sultanate and the khalifate as useful 
assets in a conflict in which the Turks had been 


{ 58 ] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


fighting, above all, for their racial supremacy, 
when on November 2, 1922, they not only deposed 
the sultan but put an end to the Ottoman sultanate 
and deprived the khalif of all temporal power. 
The word “republic” was not yet uttered, and the 
khalifate itself was not actually abolished. But, 
if a new khalif was appointed, who was still chosen 
from the ancient House of Othman, he was no 
longer to be sultan nor to be invested with the 
sword of Othman. 

This was already a negation of the theocratic 
state which Abdul Hamid had tried to revive in 
the Ottoman Empire. By the strange irony of 
things it happened, too, that the first member of 
the House of Othman to be cast for the new part 
of a purely spiritual ruler in the Mohammedan 
world was also the only one who had received 
something of a European education, who had some 
knowledge of European languages, and who had 
often displayed in public a very unorthodox liking 
for European ways of life. 

All this was already a thoroughly revolu- 
tionary departure from both Turkish and Islamic 
traditions. But much more was to follow when 
the final treaty of peace between Europe and the 
new Turkish state was at last signed after many 
diplomatic vicissitudes at Lausanne on July 24, 


[59] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


1923. The treaty itself was an abject surrender 
on the part of a war-weary and divided Europe. 
It was also on the part of England especially a 
surrender to a pro-Turkish Mohammedan agitation 
in India which, wholly artificial as it was at first, 
assumed, thanks to the weakness of the govern- 
ment of India, such a menacing character that 
it ended by intimidating the government of the 
British Empire. It restored not only Constanti- 
nople but eastern Thrace to the Turk and placed 
him once more in possession of the Bosporus and 
the Dardanelles—subject only to conditions of 
demilitarization which may read well enough on 
paper but which have as their only safeguard the 
authority of the League of Nations, and, remember- 
ing Corfu, that is still rather a weak reed to lean on. 

Turkey, it is true, had to acquiesce in the loss 
of her Arab provinces with the exception of Mosul, 
reserved for subsequent negotiation between 
Turkey and England or for reference in the last 
resort to the League of Nations, whose name seems 
to have been called in aid in this as in many other 
cases as the one means of disguising failure to 
agree. Throughout Asia Minor Turkish rule 
was revived without any of the restraints which 
the Treaty of Sévres would have placed upon it. 
The cruelest mockery of all was the clause that 


I 60 | 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


professed to provide for the rights of minorities 
which have in fact almost entirely ceased to exist. 
Not a word was said about the unfortunate 
Armenians, whose scattered remnants were aban- 
doned to the tender mercies of the Turk, or 
about the Greeks of Asia Minor, who had been 
driven forth over a million in number from their 
ancient homelands. Even the few that still re- 
mained were compelled to follow them into exile 
under an article of the treaty providing for the 
compulsory exchange of Greek and Turkish 
populations with the sole exception of the 300,000 
Greeks residing in Constantinople itself. 

A large part of the Mohammedan world hailed 
Mustapha Kemal once more as the ever victorious 
sword of Islam. Mustapha Kemal had no further 
use for the sword of Islam. Intoxicated, perhaps, 
by his own personal triumph, he felt himself free 
to throw off all further restraints. On October 29 
Turkey was declared a republic by the Grand 
National Assembly and Mustapha Kemal unani- 
mously elected to be its first president with practi- 
cally dictatorial powers, for, besides being head of 
the state and commander-in-chief of the army, 
he was made president of the Grand National 
Assembly and president of the Council of Ministers. 
The position of the khalif still remained nominally 


[ 61 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


unchanged but signs were soon not wanting that 
his days as khalif were also numbered. He had 
remained in Constantinople, and Angora suspected 
him of encouraging the discontent of which the old 
imperial capital, now turned into a mere provincial 
capital, was the center. 

An ominous campaign in the press controlled 
by the men of Angora was the prelude to a resolu- 
tion passed on March 3, by the Grand National 
Assembly, with only two dissentient votes, for the 
summary abolition of the khalifate. The very 
next day the sentence of deposition was read to 
the khalif at Constantinople and that night he 
and his son were put across the European frontier; 
a few days later all the remaining rie neee 
male and female, of the House of Othman were 
likewise banished, and all their inherited and 
personal possessions, palaces and jewels and the 
rest, were confiscated for the use of the state. 

To emphasize the significance of this action a 
series of drastic measures were forthwith enacted 
by the Grand National Assembly. The Sheikh- 
ul-Islam, who had formerly held rank immediately 
after the grand vizier, was to be no longer even 
a member of the cabinet, and his functions were 
to be purely religious. All the property of the 
Evkaf, or pious foundations, was appropriated 


{ 62 J 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


to the state. The administration of the law 
hitherto based entirely upon the Koran was sub- 
ordinated to the civil authority, just as national 
education also was by the abolition of all religious 
state schools. 

Not only have the Ottoman sultanate that 
had existed for seven centuries and the Ottoman 
khalifate which had existed for four centuries 
passed out of the pages of history, but the Turkish 
Republic has come into being as a lay-republic 
which is the very negation of Islam. One of the 
‘ great factors in the relations of the Orient with 
the Occident has disappeared with consequences 
which cannot yet be fully foreseen. In the first 
place, we cannot yet fully apprehend the reasons 
which have prompted the rulers of Turkey, or 
one should perhaps say, the ruler rather than 
rulers, for Mustapha Kemal stands out so far 
as the one absolutely dominant figure in the new 
Turkish state. His personality is a perplexing 
one. The British Army knows him as the able 
soldier and clean fighter of Gallipoli, who defeated 
its last great effort on the heights above Suvla 
Bay in August, 1915; his patriotism and integrity 
are alone singled out for praise in the singularly 
dispassionate work, Five Years in Turkey, in 
-which Liman von Sanders has described Turkish 


{ 63 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


military and political conditions while he was head 
of the German Military Mission in Turkey before 
and during the Great War. To his energy and 
capacity must be mainly ascribed the reorganiza- 
tion of the Turkish Army after the Great War and 
the national effort by which the Greek armies were 
driven out of Asia Minor, though the Greek 
disasters were in fact due in a far greater measure 
to the dissensions among the Allies, who finally 
abandoned Greece to her fate and to the folly 
and incompetence of King Constantine and his 
ministers in Athens. That there are in Mustapha 
Kemal elements of real greatness can hardly be 
disputed, and such has been the obstructive 
influence exercised with rare exceptions on human 
progress, social and political, that we have no 
reason to regret the shattering blow dealt by 
- Mustapha Kemal to the revival of a militant 
Pan-Islamism. 

How far bolshevist influences and the example 
of Lenin may have affected him I shall come to 
in one of my subsequent addresses on the new 
factor which bolshevism has imported into the 
relations between the Occident and the Orient. 
Those who would put the best construction on his 
policy still contend that he is above all an enlight- 
ened reformer, and, from the absence of any at 


{ 64 ] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


all considerable opposition to the revolutionary 
changes which he has enacted, they are disposed 
to infer that he himself merely reflects a great 
psychological change wrought in the mentality 
of a large majority of the Turkish people by the: 
terrible ordeal of almost continuous warfare and 
the frightful hardships which Turkey has passed 
through during the last twelve or thirteen years. 
But it is difficult to see how far Turkey has 
profited by exchanging a narrow religious fanati- 
cism for an equally narrow racial fanaticism. 
Turkish dreams of a great Pan-Turanian Empire 
may be dismissed as more visionary than ever 
since bolshevist Russia has resumed the hold which 
czarist Russia had established on Central Asia. 
All we need consider is what Turkey actually is 
today. Her population is estimated at between 
6,000,000 and 8,000,000, decimated by the war 
and believed to be still shrinking, as it was already 
doing before the war, from congenital disease. 
It will, it is true, be for the first time an almost 
purely Turkish population, for of the Greeks and 
Armenians who in 1914 still numbered some 
3,000,000 in Asia Minor only the scantiest rem- 
nants are left. Yet they were the most intel- 
ligent and economically valuable communities 
in the old Ottoman Empire. They were almost 


1 65 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


everywhere the chief and often the only traders, 
petty shopkeepers in the villages, and merchants 
and financiers sometimes on a large scale in the 
towns. They are gone. They may have been 
in many ways unworthy successors to the splendid 
Hellenic culture of which the memory lingers in 
the names of the old Greek cities of Asia Minor 
and not less in the epistles of the New Testament, 
but though on a lower plane they were still until 
yesterday the brains of the country. 

The European settlements which also played 
their very important part in the economic develop- 
ment of Turkey have lost, by the abolition of the 
capitulations, under the Treaty of Lausanne, the 
permanent safeguards which all Western powers 
had hitherto deemed essential for the security 
of foreign life and property in a state where justice, 
as administered in a Turkish court, has been 
hitherto a byword. The new Turkey has not 
formally repudiated her old financial obligations 
abroad as soviet Russia has done, but in practice 
she has already begun to scrap them. Yet she 
can be saved from absolute bankruptcy only 
by restoring her shattered credit abroad. 

Owing to her geographical position and to the 
fighting qualities of her people, the new Turkey 
may never be a wholly negligible factor in the 


[ 66 ] 


PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


Near East, but she can hardly aspire to a much 
higher position than that of a third-rate power 
barely equal in general resources to any of the 
Balkan states over which she used to rule, and she 
has herself abdicated the prestige and influence 
which the possession of the Turkish khalifate had, 
in our days at any rate, conferred upon her. 
The khalifate as a Mohammedan institution will 
not cease to exist, for as such it must not be 
confused with the Ottoman khalifate because it 
has lately suited the purpose of many Moham- 
medans to identify the one with the other. It 
existed long before the Ottoman Empire and may 
continue to exist long after it. 

But wherever else the khalifate may be revived, 
the Ottoman khalif has disappeared with the 
Ottoman sultanate, and this is one of the great 
events—so great that a few years ago it would have 
been deemed unthinkable—in the history of the 
relations between the Occident and the Orient. 


{ 67 ] 


‘ 


hu iN 


Nee 





II] 
THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


2. a 

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‘ae Lay ty) ‘; A) AY vy Thi i i ea | 
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Ye i) " I y iy 7 | 


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Iil 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


Egypt deserves, I think, separate treatment, 
for nowhere else have we a better illustration of 
the play of modern economic as well as social and 
religious forces on the relations between the 
Occident and the Orient. 

The land of the ancient pharaohs was conquered 
by the Persians in the fifth century B.c., and 
became in turn subject to the Roman Empire 
and the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Empire 
under the khalifate. But not until it was con- 
quered by the Turkish sultan, Selim the Grim, in 
1517, did it sink into complete obscurity, like all 
the Arab lands incorporated in the Ottoman 
Empire. Its existence was almost forgotten until 
the very close of the eighteenth century, when it 
was suddenly galvanized into life again by two 
great soldiers of fortune, neither of them of Asiatic 
or African, but both of European stock, and both 
born by a curious coincidence in the same year, 
1769, in different parts of the Mediterranean— 
the Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the 
Albanian, Mohamed Ali. 


{77 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt plunged her into 
the whirlpool of European strife. But he was much 
more than a mere military genius. He took with 
him a French scientific mission whose amazing work 
during the brief years of the French occupation 
revealed Egypt to herself as well as to the Western 
World. It was the dawn of a new life for her. 

After the British and the Turks had driven 
the French out of Egypt, Mohamed Ali, who had 
landed with the Turkish Army as a captain of 
Albanian auxiliaries, remained and fought his 
way to power out of the chaos in which the first 
clash of European ambitions on her soil had left 
Egypt. He leaped into the saddle as Turkish 
governor, and after he had tried his new armies 
and ships first on the Wahabis of Arabia and then on 
the Greeks of the Morea in revolt against Turkey, 
he himself rebelled against his Ottoman overlord 
whose Empire he nearly destroyed twice in the 
course of a ten-year struggle for independence. 
He failed because, with the exception of France, 
the European powers, and especially Great Britain, 
saw in the independence of Egypt a menace to 
their own interests. 

Nevertheless, in the end, he secured hereditary 
rights of government for himself and his family 
and a large measure of autonomy for Egypt, 


[72 ] 


fa PECULIAR CASE OR EGYPT 


while by promoting Western education, by en- 
couraging Western trade, by introducing Western 
industries, and by opening up communications 
between Europe and India through Egypt, though 
his methods were often crude and tyrannical, he 
laid the rough foundations of modern Egypt. 
In many ways a barbarian, who only learned 
to read and write in middle age, he had a touch of 
genius. He was a Mohammedan, and Turkish 
was his mother-tongue, but the strain of European 
blood in his veins made him singularly tolerant in 
matters of religion and willing to break down 
many of the other barriers between East and 
West in his adopted country. 

After his death in 1849, the contact which he 
had established between Egypt and the Occident 
continued for the next quarter of a century to be 
mainly economic. A large inflow of Europeans, 
unfortunately not always of the best type, dis- 
covered that there were still abundant fleshpots 
in Egypt. The American Civil War gave Egypt 
her chance to become a great cotton-growing 
country when the rapidly expanding cotton 
industries of Europe found themselves suddenly 
deprived of their American raw material. 

The use of steam power on sea as well as on 
land restored Egypt to her ancient position as a 


{ 73 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


highway between Europe and the more remote 
parts of the Orient. But though the construction 
of railways between Alexandria and Suez enabled 
England to rush troops to India during the 
mutiny of 1857, British statesmen entirely failed 
at first to recognize the commercial value of the 
great scheme revived by the great Frenchman, 
Ferdinand de Lesseps, for the construction of a ship 
canal between the Mediterranean and the Red 
Sea. Mainly from political jealousy of France, 
Palmerston fought a long and stubborn fight 
against it, but England’s short-sighted opposition 
was at last overborne and within a few years of 
the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, it proved 
to be of greater value to British shipping than to 
that of all the other European nations put together 
as one of the great arteries of the world’s trade. 
But if in Egypt the Orient was being drawn 
into such close intercourse with the Occident that 
she could be described without much exaggeration 
as a “European corner of Africa,” her rulers 
were at the same time showing how much easier 
it is for Orientals to contract the vices than the 
virtues of the Occident. Mohamed Ali’s succes- 
sors had not his rugged qualities, and in the 
khedive Ismail, who bought that high-sounding 
title as well as the right of primogeniture for his 


1 74 ] 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


dynasty from his Turkish overlord with untold 
gold, profligate indulgence in the worst foibles of 
the West was combined with the worst methods of 
Eastern despotism. If he filched from his subjects 
fully a quarter of the best lands in the valley of the 
Nile, that was merely straining an oriental practice. 

It was as a reckless borrower on the European 
money markets that he struck out a new and most 
dangerous line. The financiers of Paris and 
London received him with open arms, for the 
credit of the Egyptian state seemed to be ample. 
European money poured in, and Ismail spent it 
chiefly on his own pleasures, on his palaces, 
and his pleasure gardens, on occidental theaters 
and oriental harems, on the pomp and circum- 
stance of a court which, he fondly imagined, 
rivaled those of European sovereigns, on futile 
armaments and vast schemes of aggrandizement 
in Abyssinia and the Sudan. It was the oriental 
rake’s progress, and it showed even more clearly 
than what was happening at the same time in 
Turkey, where his Ottoman overlord was also 
borrowing with both hands in the European 
money markets, how dangerous for an oriental 
state are the facilities which modern financial 
methods afford to the boundless extravagance com- 
mon to so many oriental rulers. 


{75 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


There was a limit to the golden eggs which 
Egypt could lay. It was soon reached. Her 
creditors grew exacting. Ismail mortgaged his 
own property as recklessly as that of the state, 
if indeed any distinction could really be drawn 
between them; he foisted personal bills and 
treasury notes upon money-lenders, great and 
small, and, unable to meet them, when they fell 
due, renewed them on increasingly ruinous terms. 
The wretched Egyptian peasant on whose shoulders 
the whole burden ultimately rested was bled white. 
He was made to pay his taxes for years ahead and 
often twice and thrice over; he was forced to sell 
his standing crops at derisive prices to the tame 
usurer whom the tax-gatherer carried round with 
him; he was dragged away in chains from his own 
fields to work under the overseer’s whip on the 
khedive’s huge personal estates. The end came 
in 1879, when Ismail was deposed by the sultan 
at the instance of France and England, who at 
once introduced a rigid financial control over 
Egyptian expenditure in the interests of Egypt 
herself no less than of her bondholders abroad. 

The misery into which Ismail had plunged the 
Egyptian people was intense, and in their despair 
they were unable to discriminate either between 
the oppression of their own rulers, or the greed 


{ 76 | 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


of the bondholders in the background, or the 
somewhat severe discipline of the foreign adminis- 
trators brought in to extricate them from the 
morass in which all were floundering. Arabi, the 
Egyptian, headed a crude movement of popular 
revolt and carried the army with him into open 
rebellion against Ismail’s well-meaning son and 
successor, the khedive Tewfik. Many elements 
contributed to this upheaval, for Western educa- 
tion had spread sufficiently in Egypt to produce 
an educated or semi-educated class which had 
imbibed some occidental conceptions of freedom 
together with Europe’s nineteenth-century faith 
in the saving principle of nationalism. There 
-was also, however, a darker background of 
Mohammedan fanaticism, and after a murderous 
popular outbreak at Alexandria on July 11, 1882, 
European intervention became inevitable. But 
none of the European powers was keen to bell 
the Egyptian cat. 

Great Britain ultimately did so after having 
vainly endeavored to induce France and Italy and 
even Turkey to join her in putting down the Arabi 
rebellion. A purely British expedition landed in 
Egypt and on September 13 the whole Egyptian 
Army was scattered to the winds at the battle 
of Tel-el-Kebir; on the following day a British 


177} 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Army entered Cairo and has remained there ever 
since. The first Egyptian nationalist movement 
collapsed like a pricked bubble, but with it also 
most of the framework of indigenous government 
and administration, already eaten away with dry 
rot in Ismail’s days. British ministers found 
themselves in an awkward dilemma. They had 
repeatedly declared that the occupation would 
only be temporary, but they could not evacuate 
and leave the country helpless and beggared. 
International treaties and French hostility to the 
British occupation which had ousted France, 
though through her own default, from the privi- 
leged position which she had previously shared 
with Great Britain, precluded them from cutting 
the Gordian knot by the annexation of Egypt 
or even by proclaiming a British protectorate. 
They shrank from any definite decision and drifted 
almost unconsciously and rather reluctantly into 
accepting responsibilities never clearly defined, of 
which the purpose may be roughly described as 
“putting Egypt on her legs again.” 

Thus in Egypt the relations between the 
Occident and the Orient entered upon a new 
phase. Egypt was not incorporated into the 
British Empire. She remained, from the point of 
view of international law, what she had hitherto 


{78 } 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


been, an autonomous province of the Ottoman 
Empire. She retained her dynastic ruler under 
a somewhat amorphous constitution with an 
Egyptian council of ministers and an Egyptian 
administration. 

But behind that facade Britain claimed and 
exercised the right to give advice and guidance 
through her representatives ‘and official experts, 
at first few in number and very carefully selected, 
and to insist upon their being accepted and 
followed by the Egyptians. This peculiar system 
came to be described as the “British control.” 
It was a difficult system to work, but in Sir 
Evelyn Baring, afterward Lord Cromer, England 
found a quite exceptional man, perhaps the only 
man, to work it. He worked it for a quarter of a 
century so successfully that when he retired in 
1907 he had done far more than merely “putting 
Egypt on her legs again.’’ I cannot do better 
than quote the language which he himself used 
in his farewell speech to defend British control 
against the charge that, while having done great 
things for the material advancement of Egypt, 
it had done little for the intellectual or moral 
improvement of her people. He asked: 


What! Has there been no moral advancement? Is the 
country any longer governed, as was formerly the case, ex- 


{79 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


clusively by the use of the whip? Is not forced labour a 
thing of the past ? Has not the accursed institution of slavery 
practically ceased to exist? Is it not a fact that every 
individual in the country, from the highest to the lowest, is 
now equal in the eyes of the law? That thrift has been 
encouraged, and that the most humble member of society 
can reap the fruits of his own labour and industry; that 
justice is no longer bought and sold; that every one is free, 
perhaps some would think too free, to express his opinions; 
that King Baksheesh has been dethroned from high places 
and now only lingers in the purlieus and byways of the 
administration; that the fertilising water of the Nile is 
distributed impartially to prince and peasant alike; that the 
sick man can be tended in a well-equipped hospital; that the 
criminal and the lunatic are no longer treated as wild beasts; 
that the solidarity of interests between the governors and the 
governed has been recognised in theory and in practice; that 
every act of the Administration even if at times mistaken— 
for no one is infallible—bears the mark of honesty of purpose 
and an earnest desire to secure the well-being of the popula- 
tion; and further, that the funds, very much reduced in 
amount, which are now being taken from the pockets of the 
taxpayers, instead of being for the most part spent on useless 
palaces and other objects in which they were in no degree 
interested, are devoted to purposes which are of real benefit 
to the country? If all these and many other points to which 
I can not allude do not constitute some moral advancement, 
then, of a truth, I do not know what the word morality 
implies. 

The historian will not find much fault with 
Cromer’s language, and he spoke in no boastful 


[ 80 ] 


Me PROULIAR CASH OF EGYPT 


spirit. The work had certainly not been only his 
own, and he had been admirably served by most 
of the Englishmen chosen by him as agents of 
British control. His, nevertheless, had been the 
driving force and above all the great moral force 
behind the control. He was a man of exceptional 
ability and sober judgment, who possessed a rare 
combination of both energy and patience, and, 
what is more, his example set up for all Englishmen 
in Egypt the highest standard of conduct in 
private life as well as in public service. 

It was perhaps inevitable that the quality 
of British control should have deteriorated after 
he left Egypt. There was no one who could 
fill his place. But his titular successors encoun- 
tered difficulties of which he had only himself 
experienced the first beginnings, though he fully 
realized that they were bound to grow, for in 
five-and-twenty years of undisturbed peace and 
restored prosperity a generation had grown up 
which knew not Joseph or the days of the oppres- 
sion. The Egyptians had forgotten that it was 
England who had rescued them from the ruin 
which Ismail had wrought, and they began to 
resent the slighter restraints inseparable from 
foreign tutelage. Resentment was keenly felt 
at the growing number of British officials that 


I 81 J 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


blocked the way to legitimate promotion against 
many young Egyptians who, perhaps rightly, con- 
sidered themselves deserving. 

But it was the spread of Western education and 
the atmosphere of freedom created by increasing 
intercourse with the West and by the very influence 
of the Englishmen in their midst that engendered 
among the Egyptian people a new sense of nation- 
hood. Cromer himself, as he has told us in his 
Modern Egypt, had carefully watched this birth 
of Egyptian nationalism, and not without sym- 
pathy with its better aspects. For he realized 
that British control could only represent a period 
of transition leading either to direct British rule 
or to the gradual emancipation of Egypt from 
foreign leading strings, and to the former alterna- 
tive he had always refused to listen. That the 
second alternative was the one he contemplated, 
though still a long way off, he clearly indicated 
when, a couple of years before he left Egypt, he 
himself brought into the forefront of official life 
an Egyptian of approved faith in the future of 
Egyptian nationhood. It was at Lord Cromer’s 
instance that Saad Zaghlul Pasha, who in his 
youth had been a follower of Arabi and is now 
Egyptian prime minister, was appointed minister 
of education in 1905, and before leaving Egypt 


[ 82 ] 


IHE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


two years later he singled him out for exceptionally 
high praise. 

Under Cromer’s successors the new Egyptian 
nationalism continued to grow apace, though by 
no means always wisely. The khedive, Abbas 
Hilmi, had inherited the despotic and grasping 
instincts of some of his forebears. Soon after 
his accession in 1892 he had a sharp lesson or two 
from Cromer which taught him to keep them under 
restraint. But when Cromer had gone he gave 
freer vent to his hatred of British control in the 
very things in which he stood in greatest need 
of it, and in his intrigues to free himself from it 
for his own ambitious purposes he knew how to 
exploit the impatience of some of the nationalist 
leaders to whom on other grounds British control 
was equally irksome. Hence many tares as well 
as good wheat grew up in the enlarging field of 
Egyptian nationalism. 

The British government had, however, defi- 
nitely pronounced after Cromer’s retirement in 
favor of the progressive policy initiated by him 
with the inclusion of Zaghlul Pasha in the Egyptian 
cabinet. In 1908 local self-government was ex- 
tended “‘as the best preparation and education 
for the ultimate exercise of more responsible 
functions.” In 1913 a new organic statute was 


{ 83 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


drawn up under the advice of Lord Kitchener, 
who was then British representative in Cairo. 
It provided for the creation of a legislative 
assembly of a genuinely representative character 
and with something of the powers of a real parlia- 
ment, and Zaghlul Pasha who had resigned from 
the cabinet owing to differences with the khedive 
in which he had not received from Kitchener 
the support he expected, was elected by the 
nationalist majority to be its non-official vice- 
president. These constitutional changes did not, 
however, satisfy the advanced nationalists, while 
they were at least as distasteful to the khedive, 
who aimed at a great deal more than the position 
of a merely constitutional ruler. But their value 
had not been thoroughly tested when the Great 
War broke out in 1914 and the whole world, 
including Egypt, was thrown into the melting-pot. 

The fiction—for it had become little more—of 
Turkish sovereignty over Egypt became untenable 
when Turkey entered into the Great War three 
months after its outbreak as the ally of Germany 
and Austria, and the khedive, Abbas, who was 
spending the summer as he often did in Constanti- 
nople, threw in his lot with her. Great Britain 
might have taken the opportunity to annex Egypt 
as a province of the Ottoman Empire with which 


[ 84 ] 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


she was at war. That solution was considered in 
London, but was rejected in view of the agreement 
between the Allies to refrain from any final: 
decisions as to the future of conquered territories 
until the end of the war. But because, among 
other reasons, the Egyptians had to be given 
some temporary status to take the place of their 
former Ottoman status, a British protectorate 
was proclaimed and a new ruler was installed 
with the higher title of sultan in the person of 
Prince Hussein, then the eldest surviving son of 
the khedive Ismail, who was generally well liked 
and respected throughout the country. The dy- 
nasty was thus preserved and the same Egyptian 
ministers, who stood loyally by England pect | 
out the war, continued in office. 

But Egypt, placed under martial law, ee 
a great military camp as the most convenient base 
for operations against Turkey. The Egyptian 
government placed all the resources of the country 
at Britain’s disposal. The premature death in 
October, 1917, of the first sultan of Egypt, and 
the appointment in his place of Prince Fuad, 
the youngest son of Ismail, whom many Egyptians 
suspect of having unfortunately inherited his 
father’s least estimable qualities, passed almost 
unnoticed amid the growing preoccupations of 


{ 85 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


the world-war. Whatever may have been the 
secret sympathies of the masses, who had no 
love for the Turk but were his brothers in the 
faith, internal tranquillity was never once seriously 
disturbed during the war. The Egyptian nationalist 
leaders, however, were never taken into British 
confidence, though a suggestion once came from 
Cairo, but was rejected in London, that Zaghlul 
should be invited to join the Egyptian cabinet. 
The nationalists kept their own counsel, but took 
careful note of the frequent declarations of allied 
statesmen that they were fighting for the freedom 
of all nations, small as well as great, and welcomed, 
above all, President Wilson’s apostolic pronounce- 
ment in favor of self-determination. 

Two days after the Armistice, Zaghlul Pasha 
and some of his political friends called upon the 
British high commissioner and claimed full and 
complete independence for the Egyptian people 
in accordance with the principles laid down by the 
spokesmen of the Allied and Associated Powers. 
Their claim was ignored, and while they addressed 
frantic appeals to President Wilson and the big 
five in Paris, they started a raging and tearing 
propaganda which spread like wildfire over the 
country. For if Egypt was richer by some 
£200,000,000 of English money spent there during 


[ 86 } 


tiie rPERCULIAR CASE’OFR EGYPT 


the war, much of that wealth had accrued merely 
to a few classes, and the masses had undoubtedly 
suffered grave hardships during its later stages 
when recruitment for labor corps on military 
railways and the collection of supplies in kind for 
army transport and for the maintenance of the 
British expeditionary forces at the front were 
often carried out very ruthlessly under the pressure 
of military necessity, though in 1914 the British 
authorities in Cairo had publicly declared that 
Egypt would not be called upon to bear any of the 
burdens of the war. For all those hardships 
the presence of the British in Egypt and a war 
waged by them ultimately far beyond the frontiers 
of Egypt were held alone responsible, though 
much of the trouble had been caused by subordi- 
nate native officials who seized the opportunity 
to fill their pockets and satisfy personal grudges. 
Zaghlul had therefore the inarticulate masses— 
as well as the politically minded classes behind 
him when he inveighed against the continuance 
of an oppressive alien tutelage. Egyptian minis- 
ters were alarmed, and they requested to be allowed 
to confer directly with the British government in 
London. This very reasonable suggestion was 
dismissed as inopportune, and the Egyptian 
cabinet resigned. British ministers, busy with 


{ 87 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


the Paris Peace Conference, were too much 
preoccupied with the situation in Europe to 
realize how grave was the situation in Egypt. 
The agitation there grew red-hot, and the British 
military authorities set the spark to the train by 
arresting Zaghlul and three of his chief supporters 
and deporting them to Malta. Within a few 
days the whole of the country was in a blaze of 
revolt. Railways, telegraphs, and telephones were 
destroyed, and, besides arson and plunder and 
promiscuous rioting, some horrible outrages were 
perpetrated on isolated British soldiers and civil- 
ians. Nor were Europeans of other nationalities 
safe. At one moment Cairo was cut off from all 
communication with the outside world except 
by aeroplane. But the British had plenty of 
troops in Egypt, and as soon as flying columns 
could be organized to quell the insurrection, it 
collapsed completely. 

Active resistance had almost ceased when. 
Lord Allenby, the conqueror of Syria, who hap- 
pened at the time to be attending the Paris Peace 
Conference, was sent back posthaste to Egypt as 
British high commissioner. Armed rebellion was 
over, but he was still confronted with a prolonged 
campaign of passive resistance in the shape of 
political strikes which were just as much directed 


[ 88 ] 


ioe nCULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


against the British protectorate when the strikers 
were merely humble municipal scavengers or rail- 
Waymen or postmen as when they were mem- 
bers of the bar or of the higher staff of the chief 
public departments. 

There was still no Egyptian government, and 
no Egyptian could be found to form one until 
the British government agreed to release Zaghlul 
and the other Malta deportees. They were not, 
however, allowed to return to Egypt but were 
landed in France, where they installed themselves 
in Paris. There they continued to conduct their 
agitation for Egyptian independence almost as 
effectively as from Cairo, where they, mean- 
while, controlled a great. political organization, 
and they sent their own deputations abroad to 
plead their cause with the Allied and Associated 
Powers, and not least forcibly in Washington. 

The British government very tardily realized 
that something had to be done, but, as usual in 
most emergencies when government is in search 
of a policy, that “something” did not go beyond 
the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry. 
It was to go out and investigate the causes of the 
recent troubles, and it was also to make recom- 
mendations for placing the relations between 
England and Egypt on a more satisfactory footing 


1 89 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


by the grant of a generous measure of self-govern- 
ment, but without prejudice to the protectorate 
which was then for the first time receiving the 
imprimatur of international recognition in the 
Treaty of Versailles. It was a strong Commission, 
presided over by Lord Milner, a member of the 
British cabinet and one of Lord Cromer’s ablest 
lieutenants in the first decade of British control. 
But, unfortunately, seven or eight months elapsed 
before it landed in Egypt in December, 1919. 

By that time the agitation for complete inde- 
pendence had been resumed with fresh vigor. 
In nothing have the Egyptians, and indeed most 
Orientals who have been brought into contact 
with the Occident, shown themselves more adept 
pupils than in the art of political agitation. Before 
the Commission arrived public meetings at which 
the bar was conspicuous were held to denounce 
the Commission, and as the Egyptian legisla- 
ture was closed, its members held informal but 
well-advertised gatherings, and adjured the coun- 
try to have nothing to do with the accursed 
thing. 

The Omdehs, or village headmen, who have 
always wielded considerable influence in the rural 
districts, telegraphed their indignant protest to 
Zaghlul in Paris, who replied with a message of 


I 90 | 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


warm encouragement and approval. Notables 
and Ulema, the leaders of Mohammedan opinion, 
even the princes of the reigning dynasty, followed 
suit, and the students of the government colleges 
as well as of the great Mohammedan University 
of El Azhar in Cairo, the boys in the secondary 
and primary schools, and even the girls’ schools, 
in which the limit of age is between five and eleven 
years, went on strike and promenaded the streets 
to swell the boycott chorus and cry shame upon 
the protectorate. 

In Cairo and in Alexandria there were street 
demonstrations on a large scale, frequently ending 
in violent rioting as they always attracted a large 
tail of rabble out for any mischief that might be 
going. When that mischief assumed the shape 
of looting Greek and Jewish shops and attacking 
harmless foreigners, British troops had to be sent 
in to reinforce the Egyptian police, and on 
November 16, close to the sultan’s palace in Cairo, 
a mob attacked and set fire to a couple of police 
stations, and held its ground so fiercely that nearly 
a hundred rioters were killed and wounded before 
order could be restored. 

It was in this explosive atmosphere Oy, Lord 
Milner’s Commission landed in Egypt in 
December, 1919. But in spite of the boycott its 


[ 91} 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


members carried on their work in Cairo and in the 
provinces, though sometimes not without dis- 
agreeable incidents. Some of them had many old 
friends in Egypt, and there were a number of 
representative Egyptians who were willing enough 
to see them privately. But the Commission 
needed no close investigation to gauge the state 
of the country when bombs were thrown in open 
daylight and in frequented thoroughfares on 
Egyptian ministers suspected of lukewarmness on 
the question of full and immediate independence. 
The pre-war system of British control had clearly 
broken down and could never be restored on 
pre-war lines. The relations between England 
and Egypt would have to be placed on a new 
basis of mutual consent if Egypt was to be saved 
from the demoralizing consequences of a lawless 
agitation, and if England was to remain faithful 
to her own liberal traditions and redeem the 
promises she had repeatedly given to the Egyptian 
people. One strong argument against the uncon- 
ditional recognition of Egyptian independence 
was that Egypt could not yet hope to uphold it 
without British support against possible foreign 
ageression. 

But the protectorate, at any rate, would have 
to go by the board, for its very name, which in its 


{ 92 | 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


Arabic form connoted a humiliating status of 
inferiority, had come to stink in the nostrils of all 
Egyptians, who, moreover, professed never to have 
accepted it as anything but a war measure. If Great 
Britain, to whom Egypt owed her release from 
Turkish sovereignty, was entitled to claim definite 
safeguards for her special interests in the country 
and for those of the large foreign communities 
who looked to her to protect them, they would 
have to be embodied in a bilateral treaty in return 
for Britain’s acknowledgment of Egyptian inde- 
pendence. 

These were roughly the conclusions at which 
the Commission arrived when it left Egypt three 
months later, and Lord Milner felt that, if an 
agreement was to be worked out on those lines, 
it was essential for him to establish contact with 
Zaghlul himself, who still substantially controlled 
the situation from his hotel in Paris. This was 
achieved through the good offices of Adly Pasha, 
a moderate Egyptian statesman from whom the 
Commission had received a great deal of help in 
Cairo. The result of their meeting in Paris 
was that Zaghlul agreed to follow Milner to London 
and continue their conversations there. Together, 
after long but friendly discussions, they finally 
outlined an agreement acceptable to both parties 


{93 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


as the basis for a formal treaty of alliance between 
Great Britain and Egypt. 

The terms leaked out prematurely, but on the 
whole they were favorably received in both 
countries. Lord Milner’s Commission then pro- 
ceeded to complete its report, which was laid 
before Parliament. It concluded with the follow- 
ing weighty recommendation: 

We therefore strongly advise His Majesty’s Government 
to enter without undue delay into negotiations with the 
Egyptian Government for the conclusion of a treaty on the 
lines which we have ventured to recommend. It would, in 


our opinion, be a great misfortune if the present opportunity 
was lost. 


That statesman-like document marked an 
important stage, not merely in Anglo-Egyptian 
relations, but in the readjustment of the wider 
relations between the Occident and the Orient. 
It recognized that in Egypt at least the Orient had 
gone far to establish its claim to be treated on a 
footing of equality. Whether or not the Egyptians 
were really yet fitted for self-government, the 
experiment could no longer be postponed without 
going back on the principles of British policy which 
shrank more and more from a resort to violence 
for the mere purpose of maintaining an alien 
people in continued subjection. 


[ 94 J 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


A new cabinet was constituted in Egypt under 
Adly Pasha, who had first brought Zaghlul and 
Milner together, and it was avowedly constituted 
in order to carry on negotiations with the British 
government on the lines of the Milner Commis- 
sion’s report. But when Adly arrived in London 
he was soon disillusioned. When he called on 
Lloyd George, the British prime minister, profess- 
ing to ignore the Egyptian demand for independ- 
ence, pointed dramatically to a chair in the 
Imperial Conference room which he invited Egypt 
to occupy as a valued member of the British 
commonwealth of nations. Utterly ignorant of 
the Orient, he had listened to the voice of the 
tempter, Winston Churchill, who, though he 
called himself a Liberal, had always remained 
at heart much more reactionary than many of 
the Conservative party to which he originally be- 
longed. He cared nothing for Lord Milner’s rec- 
ommendations. The one aspect of the Egyptian 
question, as he saw it, was its strategical aspect, 
and under his inspiration negotiations centered 
upon the nature and extent of the military hold 
which Britain should retain upon Egypt. While 
Adly was disposed to accept the retention in 
Egypt of a small British force as before the war, 
but wished it to be transferred from Cairo to 


195] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


some locality near the Suez Canal, and with a 
special view to its protection, Churchill was 
determined not only to keep a garrison in the 
capital but to bind Egypt down to a formal and 
unreserved recognition of British rights of military 
occupation wherever the British government 
pleased and for however long, going thereby far 
beyond anything demanded of her before the 
war. 

The London negotiations might have broken 
down on other points, but it was on this point 
that they actually broke down in November, 
Ig21. Adly returned to Egypt and he and his 
colleagues resigned, and when the British govern- 
ment followed up the rupture of the negotiations 
with a note which in effect implied a reversion to 
a policy of domination, events at once bore out 
the wisdom of the Milner Commission’s warning. 
Fresh disturbances broke out and Zaghlul was 
once more deported with a number of his followers. 

Order was restored, but England had laid 
herself open to a charge of bad faith, and not only 
her Egyptian friends, but her own people in 
Egypt, were driven to despair. The four principal 
British officials who, as advisers, were still to 
some extent responsible for Egyptian administra- 
tion in the important departments of the interior, 


[ 96 ] 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


finance, education; and justice, addressed a 
remarkable memorandum to Lord Allenby express- 
ing their unanimous opinion that any decision 
which did not admit the principle of Egyptian 
independence, and which forcibly maintained the 
protectorate, must entail serious risk of revolution 
throughout the country, and would in any case 
produce complete administrative chaos, rendering 
government impossible. The whole structure of 
government was Egyptian, and British control 
could not possibly, they contended, be exercised 
without full Egyptian co-operation in all branches 
of administration, as it had been proved in the 
spring of 1919 when an attempt had been made 
to carry on the government without a ministry 
and with a large proportion of Egyptian officials 
on strike. 

Lord Allenby himself, to the dismay of the 
British government, indorsed those views, and, 
when he was sent for to London, told Lloyd 
George to his face that he would have to decline 
to bear responsibility for a policy which could 
only be carried through with a large British army 
behind it. Lloyd George seldom held out against 
anyone who stood up to him, and within a few 
days, while boldly maintaining that British policy 
in. Egypt remained unchanged, made a new 


[97] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


“declaration of principles” (February 28, 1922) 
to the effect that the British protectorate over 
Egypt was terminated; that Egypt was declared 
to be an independent, sovereign state; and that 
martial law should be withdrawn as soon as an 
act of indemnity had been passed by the Egyptian 
government. He merely added that, pending the 
conclusion “‘by free discussion and _ friendly 
accommodation” of agreements concerning the 
security of the communications of the British 
Empire in Egypt, the defense of Egypt against 
all foreign aggression and interference, the protec- 
tion of foreign interests and of minorities in Egypt, 
and, finally, the Sudan, His Majesty’s government 
reserved these matters to their own discretion, 
the status quo remaining intact in regard to them. 

These “principles” were practically those of 
the Milner report, with this tremendous difference, 
however, that the latter proposed to have them 
set forth in a bilateral treaty by which Egypt 
would have simultaneously contracted binding 
- obligations in regard to the points which Lloyd 
George airily remitted to future negotiations, 
without in the meantime securing anything in the 
shape of binding obligations from Egypt. 

Since then Egypt has been recognized by 
Great Britain as a free and independent sovereign 


{ 98 ] 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


state. King Fuad has assumed the royal title 
and appointed his own diplomatic representatives 
abroad, a new Egyptian constitution has been 
enacted, martial law has ceased, general elections 
have been held, and Zaghlul has not only returned 
to Egypt, but is now prime minister with a huge 
majority behind him in the new Parliament. 

On the other hand, the points reserved by 
Lloyd George for future negotiations are no nearer 
a settlement. A small British force is still 
stationed in Cairo and Alexandria, and Egypt 
has become if anything a more important base 
than ever for British military aviation, while at 
the last Imperial Conference the British domin- 
ions laid renewed stress upon the necessity of 
safeguarding the Empire’s line of maritime com- 
munications through the Suez Canal. Things 
have been complicated also by the entire surrender 
to Turkey, under the Lausanne Treaty, of the 
capitulations which constituted throughout the 
whole Ottoman Empire the only final guaranty for 
the material interests of foreign residents of all 
nationalities. It has become much more difficult 
to insist upon the maintenance of the same system 
in Egypt where justice has at any rate long since 
ceased to be the mere byword it has always been 
in Turkey. 


[99 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


It is, I may remark in passing, one of the 
anomalies of the Egyptian situation that the 
whole economic life of the country is controlled 
by foreigners, not only or chiefly Englishmen, but 
Frenchmen, Italians, Greeks, and many other 
nationalities, including before the war large 
numbers of Germans and Austrians who will soon 
be returning there. For while the Egyptians have 
responded to Western education in many of the 
liberal professions, and have often become efficient 
administrators as well as skilful adepts in the 
political arts of the West, they have always kept 
entirely aloof from the higher walks of commerce 
and industry and finance. They have left it to 
the foreigner to develop the great natural resources 
of their country, and while his brains have devel- 
oped its material prosperity, his example has 
encouraged a taste for all the luxuries and amenities 
of life unknown to former Egyptian generations. 

The Egyptians may well have grown impatient 
of the restraints imposed upon them by the ancient 
system of capitulations under which every large 
foreign settlement in their midst enjoys a privileged 
position under its own consular jurisdiction, and 
has almost become an imperium in imperio, 
since even in the matter of taxation the hands of 
the Egyptian government are tied up in a network 


[100 } 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


of treaties which cannot be modified without the 
consent of some seventeen or eighteen foreign 
powers. In this matter England is not even free 
to deal with the Egyptian government on her 
own account alone and independently of other 
foreign powers toward whom she incurred implicit 
if not explicit responsibilities when she assumed 
sole control over the Egyptian government and 
administration. 

On many points one may sympathize with the 
demands which Egypt has now raised under altered 
conditions, but Zaghlul appears unhappily resolved 
to place in the forefront of Egyptian demands the 
very worst one of all, namely, the recovery of 
Egypt’s full rights of sovereignty over the Sudan. 
For, on the same principle of self-determination on 
which the Egyptians have based their claim to 
independence, the people of the Sudan have the 
right to reject Egyptian rule and do emphatically 
reject it. 

Mohamed Ali conquered the Sudan for Egypt 
a hundred years ago, and Egypt so misruled it 
for over fifty years that the Sudanese responded 
at once to the call of the able if fanatical leader 
who in the early eighties drove the Egyptians 
out with great slaughter. The Mahdi, it is true, 
himself in turn chastised them with scorpions, 


{ 101 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


and Kitchener was hailed as a deliverer when, 
in 1898, he reconquered Khartum, where Gordon 
had died in 1884, like the great Christian hero 
that he was, in a vain attempt to stem the deso- 
lating tide of Mahdism. Since then, in recognition 
of Egypt’s financial and military contribution to 
the reconquest of the Sudan, the Egyptian flag 
has been flown side by side with the British flag 
as an emblem of joint sovereignty, but the adminis- 
tration of the country has been wholly in British 
hands and has restored to the country a marvelous 
degree of prosperity when one remembers that 
under the Mahdi’s barbarous despotism its popu- 
lation was reduced in some fifteen years from 
8,000,000 to a little over 2,000,000 people. 

All that the Egyptians can rightfully demand 
is that nothing shall be done in the Sudan to 
curtail the flow of water from the Blue and White 
Nile on which Egyptian irrigation, i.e., the life 
of Egypt, depends. For this, ample guaranties 
will not be refused them. But England cannot 
consent to hand over the Sudanese to the 
Egyptians, whom they hate and despise, and who 
could never enforce their rule on a much more 
warlike race, much better equipped today than 
it ever was before for resistance. Unless Egypt 
is prepared to yield on that point it is difficult 


{ 102 } 


we PECULIAR: CASE OF EGYPT 


to see how Zaghlul can hope to succeed in the 
negotiations for which he has been invited to 
London, and if these negotiations break down 
one does not know where to look for the possibility 
of an accommodation of which many patriotic 
Egyptians and sensible Englishmen alike admit 
the urgency. 

For the Egyptian has not yet put off the old 
Adam. With the relaxation of British control, 
nepotism and corruption, never wholly exorcised, 
are again creeping into the public services, and 
the mere withdrawal of the European expert’s 
hand from the administration of the state railways 
has already caused general and not unwarranted 
alarm. The harm done to the rising generation 
by the introduction of political agitation into 
schools and colleges cannot be easily repaired. 
The machinery of parliamentary government has 
yet to be tested by experience, even if an Egyptian 
minister as popular as Zaghlul can hold his own 
against King Fuad, who is scarcely of the stuff 
of which constitutional rulers are made. He takes 
far too much after his father, Khedive Ismail, 
of whose autocratic instincts he has inherited a 
goodly share. He is adroit and knows how to 
bend people of all classes to his will, and even 
how to gain the plaudits of the crowd, though, 


[ 103 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


when he returned to Egypt a grown man after 
having accompanied his father into exile and 
having been educated almost entirely in Italy, 
he could neither speak Arabic properly nor go 
through without careful prompting the complicated 
ritual of Mohammedan worship. 

Western civilization is certainly something 
more than a mere veneer in Egypt, but the masses, 
too easy-going as a rule to be aggressively intoler- 
ant, are still apt to be swayed by sudden gusts of 
Mohammedan fanaticism, and the great Egyptian 
University of El Azhar, still steeped in Moham- 
medan medievalism, turns out every year a 
larger number of students than any of the modern 
government colleges. El Azhar has sent out to 
the Mohammedans all over the world an invitation 
for a conference to be held next year on the future 
of the khalifate. It may never be held, and, if 
held, it may fail to promote unity. Considering 
what are King Fuad’s idiosyncracies, it would be 
the crowning paradox in the land of paradoxes 
if he were chosen as the successor to the Turkish 
khalif whom the men of Angora have dethroned. 
While it would bring the khalifate into much 
closer contact than it ever was at Constantinople 
with the modern Occident, it might equally well 
serve to strengthen the reactionary forces in 


{ 104 ] 


THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT 


Egypt and imperil the equilibrium, none too stable 
already, between the Occident and the Orient 
which the more progressive Egyptians claim to 
have achieved. 

But I do not wish to lay excessive stress on the 
disturbing features of the Egyptian situation. 
There are brighter sides to the picture. The 
Egyptians have become more of a nation than any- 
one would have believed possible a half-century 
ago. Nationalism has not been a vain word with 
them, for it has done a great deal to draw together 
the Mohammedan majority and the Coptic 
Christian minority of the population. Though 
they may seem to us to be trying to run before 
they can walk, careless of the pitfalls with which 
their adventure as an independent and sovereign 
country is beset, they are at any rate looking 
forward, and not backward to a mythical past. 
They may find the task of governing themselves 
more difficult than they imagine, but they base 
their claim to make the attempt on a principle 
which the Occident cannot deny, namely, that 
it is through freedom and the exercise of independ- 
ent responsibility that nations can in the long run 
alone learn to govern themselves. If they succeed, 
England will be able to claim some share of credit 
for herself, for it is she who will have given the 


{ 105 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Egyptians their chance in the modern world, 
first, by ending the old system of indigenous 
despotism which had brought them near to ruin, 
and then by voluntarily releasing them from her 
own tutelage to which they owe whatever fitness 
they now possess for democratic freedom. 


{ 106 } 


IV 


THE GREAT BRITISH EXPERIMENT 
IN INDIA 


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IV 


THE GREAT BRITISH EXPERIMENT 
IN INDIA 


Nature herself seems to have set India apart 
as a unique field for such a unique experiment 
as the government of 300,000,000 Asiatics of 
different races and creeds and languages by a 
small and remote island kingdom of the Occident. 

A vast lozenge-shaped projection from the 
great continent of Asia, inclosed within stupendous 
mountain ranges on its northern land frontier, 
and everywhere else by the wide, encircling ocean, 
and inhabited by a multitude of peoples in various 
stages of social development, India had no direct 
contact with the Occident after Alexander the 
Great’s meteoric invasion, third century B.c., 
which only reached to the Indus, until the first 
landing of the Portuguese in 1498, when they 
rounded the Cape of Good Hope and discovered a 
new highway from Europe across hitherto un- 
traveled seas. Another century passed before 
the English followed in the wake of the 
Portuguese. On the last day of the year 1600, 


[ 109 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


near the end of her reign, Queen Elizabeth granted 
to a “company of merchants of London trading 
in the East Indies” a charter out of which grew up 
the most powerful trading corporation known in 
history as the Honourable East India Company, 
and finally, the great British Empire of India. 

If time allowed, I should like to show you 
how British power beyond the seas was built up 
simultaneously during the next two centuries 
in India and in America. In such very different 
fields the attempt naturally worked out on very 
different lines and with very different results, 
though in both cases there was at first a similar 
purpose of commercial enterprise only. In North 
America the British found almost empty coast- 
lands not entirely unlike their own in climate 
and natural surroundings, ready to be peopled 
and developed by men and women of their own 
race who made their homes there and founded 
sturdy communities resolved to preserve the habits 
and traditions and even the institutions of the 
old country. In India, on the contrary, the 
British found an immense and populous sub- 
continent with powerful rulers and an ancient 
civilization as strange to them as its fierce sunshine 
and tropical vegetation. Only in the prime of life 
could they withstand its oppressive climate, and 


{ 110 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


they were content to secure by agreement with its 
local rulers a precarious foothold at a few isolated 
points on the far-flung coast for the establishment 
of small settlements or “factories,” as they were 
then called, which they never regarded as their 
permanent homes. 

On the Coromandel coast at Madras, on the 
Arabian Sea at Surat, and later on at Bombay 
and in the Bay of Bengal where Calcutta ultimately 
grew up, they slowly but steadily prospered as 
traders, and mainly because, unlike the Portuguese 
who had been ruthless both as conquerors and 
missionaries, they had made it their rule not to 
meddle with the religious and social customs of 
the natives, and avoided all interference in the 
internal affairs of the country, where the great 
Moghul Empire was at that time the undisputed 
paramount power. Their chief troubles at first 
were not in India itself, but at home, with the 
vacillating policies of kings and ministers and the 
intrigues of rival trading interests, while they 
had to reckon with the competition, by no means 
always peaceful, of other European nations equally 
bent upon securing for themselves new markets 
beyond the seas. 

In the development of their trading settlements 
in India, just as in the consolidation of their 


{ 111 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


colonies in North America, the British had to 
fight in turn the same European rivals. The 
Portuguese power in India was rapidly decaying 
before the British made their appearance on the 
scene, but the Dutch traders who had got ahead 
of them were at least as enterprising as the 
British, and, for some time more vigorously 
supported by their own government at home, 
they had larger resources, both financial and naval, 
at their backs. Protracted and often unofficial 
warfare, conducted mainly on the eastern seas 
between Dutch and British, and often while the 
two nations were themselves at peace in Europe, 
ended in the withdrawal of the Dutch to the 
East Indian Archipelago where they remained 
and are still firmly established. 

No sooner had the Dutch retired than the 
French entered the lists as still more formidable 
rivals. Events followed much the same course in 
North America where New York was first of all 
New Amsterdam, and, when the Dutch had been 
ejected, a far more obstinate struggle was fought 
out between England and France for the mastery 
of the North American continent. In India, 
likewise, as soon as the Moghul Empire began to 
disintegrate, the question that arose was whether 
British or French ascendancy should prevail. It 


{ 112 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


remained for a long time in the balance, and the 
genius of Dupleix might have turned it in favor 
of France had he not been sacrificed to the greed 
and sordid intrigues of the French court in the 
worst days of Louis XV. The issue of that duel 
between France and England was finally settled 
mainly by the superiority of British naval power. 

Two locally decisive land battles were fought 
almost at the same time in North America and 
in India, namely, the battle of Plassey in 1757, 
which led straight to British dominion in India, and 
the battle of Quebec, which shattered French 
dominion in North America. To make the parallel 
more complete, the obstinacy and short-sightedness 
of a British king was one at least of the many 
causes that ultimately led to the loss of the old 
British colonies in America just as the corruption 
and incompetence of the French court had 
already destroyed the promise of a French empire 
in India. Thus it came to pass that almost 
at the same time as with the American War of 
Independence Britain ceased to be the dominant 
power in North America, she became the dominant 
power in India. For, after many vicissitudes and 
much jealousy and opposition at home, the East 
India Company had grown so powerful in London 
and British trade with the East had become so 


{ 113 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


great a national asset that when they were vitally 
threatened by the state of anarchy which had 
spread over India with the decay of the Moghul 
power and by the competitive ambitions of France 
who was England’s great rival in Europe, the East 
India Company had been at last driven to depart 
from its settled policy of non-intervention in 
Indian quarrels and the British government in 
like manner compelled to stand by the East India 
Company. 

The British entered, as did the French, into 
local alliances with rival Indian potentates, and, 
following the French example, raised and organized 
native armies with European officers and equip- 
ment and discipline to fight their battles. These 
were in turn reinforced by fleets and armies sent 
out from England and France, and when the 
French ultimately gave up the contest, the 
British were so firmly anchored in India, not only 
by their material interests, but by the engagements 
into which they had entered with many of the 
peoples and princes of India, that they were almost 
unavoidably constrained to assume the full respon- 
sibilities of rulership as the one governing power 
that could save India from floundering in chaos. 

But my purpose is not to describe the gradual 
expansion of British dominion over the whole of 


{ 114] 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


India, from Cape Comorin, only a few degrees 
north of the Equator, to the Himalayan Roof of 
the World, but to focus your attention on the 
peculiar relationship between the Occident and the 
Orient which has arisen out of British rule in India. 

I would ask you, however, to bear in mind 
that, until British rule, India had only on rare 
occasions and for relatively short periods, attained 
to political unity, and still less to a sense of national 
unity. For from the dawn of history we find the 
peoples of India with their various quite distinct 
races and languages almost always split up into 
a vast number of kingdoms and confederacies con- 
stantly at war with one another. : 

Even the great Moghul Empire, to which the 
British Indian Empire may be said to have suc- 
ceeded, was in no sense a national Indian empire, 
nor was its authority ever established over the 
whole peninsula. The Moghuls were the last of a 
long succession of Mohammedan conquerors who 
had poured down from Central Asia through the 
mountain passes of northern India, and built 
up their power on the ruins of earlier Hindu states. 
The Moghuls were originally in race and in religion 
just as much aliens in India as the British, and 
they subdued India by the sword alone. Their 
system of government was a masterful, but under 


{ 115 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


some of their greatest emperors such as Akbar, 
a not unenlightened despotism. Though for rea- 
sons of policy they converted only a portion of 
the population to their Mohammedan creed, 
those conversions were largely effected by force, 
and the Hindus were seldom allowed to forget 
that Islam was the dominant faith throughout 
the land. 

I would also remind you that to the present: 
day, one-third of the area of India and one- 
quarter of its population is subject only to British 
overlordship without any rights of internal admin- 
istration, and that overlordship is conditioned on 
ancient treaties of alliance under which the 
hereditary rulers of what are called the “native 
states” of India—some of them almost as large 
as the minor states of Europe—retain all their 
autonomous rights of government and administra- 
tion, the British government of India controlling 
only their foreign relations and matters of all 
Indian interest, ports, railways, etc. Most of 
the native states themselves sought this form of 
British protection against the political anarchy 
which threatened to overwhelm them when the 
Moghul Empire fell to pieces through the weakness 
and corruption and incompetence of its later 
rulers. British rule was never established through- 


{ 116 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


out India by the sword alone, but by the promise 
of law and order which India was looking for in 
vain elsewhere at one of the great crises in her 
history. 

The magnitude of the responsibilities which 
devolved upon the East India Company when, 
in the second half of the eighteenth century, it 
found itself, through the sheer force of circum- 
stances rather than through any deliberately pre- 
conceived design, transformed from a mere trading 
corporation into a great agency of government 
and administration, was at first only imperfectly 
apprehended in England. Clive, the victor of 
Plassey, was the first to recognize that such vast 
responsibilities could not be properly discharged 
by a trading company, and he urged the British 
government to assume without delay full sover- 
eignty over all the British possessions in India. 

But public opinion at home was not yet ripe 
for such a change, and only after the scandals of 
misrule and corruption among officers of the 
company in Bengal had alarmed the better 
conscience of England was the British government 
moved to assume very real responsibility by bring- 
ing under its direct control the company’s Board 
of Directors in London and its chief agents in 


India. The American War of Independence had 
[117] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


taught England a costly lesson in statesmanship, 
and no sooner was it brought to an end by the 
recognition of the independence of the United 
States of America than Pitt’s Government of India 
Act of 1784 laid down a new and far-reaching 
principle for the future governance of British 
India—the principle of trusteeship, to be carried 
into practice by Englishmen on the spot but under 
the supervision and responsibility of the British 
Parliament. 

Dominion over alien races was for the first 
time recognized to involve a great moral obligation 
toward them. Their interests, and not those 
merely of their alien rulers, were to be a principal 
consideration. The rulers were to regard them- 
selves as trustees for those over whom they ruled. 
It is a principle which in our own times has been 
at least formally accepted by all Western nations 
who hold dominion over alien races, and it has 
been consecrated under a new form by the Cove- 
nant of the League of Nations. But to Pitt be- 
longs the credit of having been the first to use the 
word “‘trust”’ in this connection, and the man who 
prevailed upon him to use it was Wilberforce, to 
whom more than to any other single individual 
the world was to owe the abolition of the slave 
trade. 


{ 118,] 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


The East India Company set its house in 
order and organized great public services which, 
whatever their other shortcomings, have main- 
tained to the present day the highest possible 
standards of integrity and even-handed justice. 
Nor were British administrators concerned merely 
to establish the rule of law in the vast territories 
committed to their care. They began to look 
forward. Exactly one hundred years ago, in 
1824, one of the greatest of them, Sir Thomas 
Munro, then governor of Madras, boldly raised 
the whole question of England’s mission in India. 
Her duty, he declared, was “‘to train Indians to 
govern and protect themselves.’ It was a far- 
reaching pronouncement, and though Munro was 
in advance of his times, he gave a new orientation 
to British statesmanship. 

The first step clearly was to give India the same 
education which had trained the British people 
to self-government and self-protection. The at- 
mosphere at home was favorable, and under the 
same liberal impulse that had carried the great 
Reform Bill of 1832 in England, the famous 
minute drafted by Macaulay in 1833, while he 
held high legal office in Calcutta, finally committed 
the British rulers of India to the introduction of 
Western education. It was a tremendous experi- 


[ 119 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


ment, for it meant nothing less than taking the 
peoples of India into partnership with Western 
civilization, and the gulf between it and their 
own ancient civilization was profound. 

India’s civilization is bound up with Hinduism, 
which is a great social as well as religious system. 
As a religion it is singularly elastic, ranging from 
the gross idol-worship of the masses to the most 
subtle conceptions of pantheism and even atheism, 
which have been elaborated in the course of 
centuries by Indian philosophers out of the 
primitive mythology of the sacred Vedas. As a 
social system, however, Hinduism is the most 
rigid that the world has ever seen, for it is based 
on the bed rock of caste which governs life not only 
from birth to death, but through an endless 
cycle of rebirths from death to life again. Nothing 
can be more utterly opposed to the sturdy indi- 
vidualism which has been hitherto the bed rock 
of Western civilization. For under the Hindu caste 
system every Hindu is born into a particular social 
group of which the laws govern every incident of his 
life, prescribing minutely those whom he may marry 
and eat with and converse with and the daily ritual 
which he must perform and the manner in which 
he must be buried, his inheritance distributed, and 
the continuity of ancestral worship preserved. 


{ 120 | 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


At the apex of the caste system stands the 
Brahmanical caste, semi-divine in origin, invested 
with exclusive spiritual authority, and below it 
a long gradation of other castes reaching in a 
descending scale down to millions of human beings 
who are regarded as outside the pale and treated 
.as untouchable, ie., that social and physical 
contact with them is deemed to constitute religious 
pollution. Considering how strong the ractal 
feeling is today in India against the British as 
the ruling white race, it is as well to note that the 
Sanskrit word for caste means “color,” and, as 
the early invaders of India who came down 
from Central Asia in prehistoric times were 
Aryans of a lighter complexion than the popula- 
tions commonly called Dravidian whom they 
subdued, it may be reasonably inferred that the 
caste system was primarily developed by the 
Aryan Brahmans in order to preserve the prestige 
and purity of the conquering race. The Aryan 
Brahmans were, in fact, the ruling “white race”’ 
of those remote ages, and their purpose, though not 
their methods, was precisely the same as that of 
the white race today seeking to maintain its 
superiority over the colored races of the world. 

Nowadays the spread of Western education 
and the everyday exigencies of modern life have 


{ 121 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


led to some relaxation of caste observances, but 
still almost only in non-essentials, and in a large 
part of rural India, especially in the south, they 
have lost very little of their rigidity. I have 
myself seen a Brahman judge on circuit in a 
native state of southern India holding his court in 
the open, outside a village of low-caste untouch- 
ables, and, as both the plaintiff and the defendant 
were untouchables, the laws of caste compelled 
them to stand at such a distance from the Brahman 
judge in order not to pollute him by undue 
proximity to his person, that their statements, 
and those of many witnesses also, had, like his 
questions, to be carried to and fro by ushers of 
intermediate castes within a lessening range of 
pollution. Even today there are many village 
schools in which boys belonging to the lower castes 
have to sit apart on the veranda just outside 
the schoolroom and pick up what they can of the 
lesson given by the Brahman teacher to the higher- 
caste boys inside the schoolroom who would not 
be allowed by their parents to attend if they had to 
rub shoulders with their lower-caste school-fellows. 

Another puzzling feature is that superiority 
of caste does not by any means always correspond 
with superiority of what we call worldly position. 
Brahmans often pursue very humble avocations, 


{ 122 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


whereas lower-caste Hindus may acquire great 
wealth, and, under modern conditions, rise to 
positions of considerable influence. But the 
Brahman gua Brahman always remains entitled 
to the reverence due to his caste from every 
Hindu who clings to orthodox beliefs. 

I will give you another instance from my own 
experience. I was staying at Viceregal Lodge at 
Delhi when a Hindu of a lower caste but high 
up in the public service, Western educated and 
wearing European dress, came to have an audience 
with the viceroy, and as he passed up the steps, 
I saw him stoop almost to the ground to do homage 
and go through the form of kissing the naked feet of 
the chuprassi, or doorkeeper, who wore the viceroy’s 
scarlet and gold livery, but was a Brahman. 

In these circumstances you can imagine the 
immense and peculiar difficulties and pitfalls with 
which Western education was and still is beset 
among Hindus. The response which it met with 
in the earliest days of its introduction was never- 
theless marvelous, and not least among the higher 
castes of whom some of the most gifted members 
actually embraced Christianity. But the reaction 
was bound to follow. Western education struck 
at the roots of too many ancient customs and 
beliefs, and at too many vested interests, and, 


[ 123 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


not least, at those of the higher castes, es- 
pecially those of the Brahmans, while the political 
changes, which were steadily extending the area 
of direct British administration in India and 
sweeping away some of the worst survivals of 
indigenous administration, where they proved 
themselves utterly incorrigible, spread equal alarm 
in other intensely conservative quarters. 

Nor was it only with Hindu civilization that 
Western education was in conflict, The vast 
majority of the peoples of India were Hindus, but 
there was also a large Mohammedan minority. 
The fundamental monotheism of the Indian 
Mohammedan drew him in some respects nearer 
than the Hindu to his new British rulers, but there 
was nevertheless the same deep-rooted antagonism 
between the Mohammedan outlook on life and all 
forms of Western progress in India as in other 
parts of the Islamic world. The Indian Moham- 
medans proved, in fact, for a long time more 
refractory to Western education than the Hindus, 
and though there was no love lost between 
Mohammedans and the Hindus, those who stand 
in the ancient ways, whether Mohammedans or 
Hindus, were alike rebels at heart against the 
Western civilization which British rule was import- 
ing into India. 


[ 124 ] 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


That rebellion was at the bottom of the great 
Mutiny of 1857. It was on the surface a military 
revolt, but, if Mohammedans did most of the 
fighting, Hindus supplied the brains and a great 
deal of the driving power. It was a disastrous 
episode, for, though it was a short one and con- 
fined to a relatively small area of upper and cen- 
tral India, the horrors which accompanied the rising 
and the sternness of its repression gave a deplor- 
able setback to the better influences on both sides 
which before the mutiny had been steadily moving 
toward mutual understanding and good will. 

The East India Company, which had long 
ceased to be a trading corporation but had 
remained under Parliament the principal agency 
of government and administration in India, 
disappeared altogether after the mutiny, when the 
crown assumed, as Clive himself had urged a 
whole century earlier, direct and sole responsibility. 
The central government was invested under the 
control of the British Parliament with supreme 
authority over the provincial governments and 
with power to maintain the old treaty connections 
with the autonomous native states and their 
princes. The machinery remained practically 
the same, except that the secretary of state for 
India who was henceforth a member of the 


[ 125 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


British cabinet superseded the Company’s Board 
of Control in London, and the governor-general of 
India came to be described as viceroy. 

Queen Victoria’s proclamation conveyed to 
her Indian peoples a generous assurance of her 
undiminished confidence and affection. “In their 
prosperity,” she said, “will be our strength, in 
their contentment our security, and in their 
gratitude our best reward.” 

Then followed fifty years of internal peace and 
great material progress, for though one is shy 
to use the word “prosperity”’ in relation to a 
country where the standard of living is still 
incredibly low among the toiling masses, the 
‘extraordinary growth of the population, which 
rose within that half-century from two to three 
hundred millions, affords ample evidence of 
steadily improved conditions. In the towns and 
especially among the Hindus, the demand for 
Western education increased continuously. The 
rising generation thronged to the high schools and 
universities, of which the first was founded at 
Calcutta just after the mutiny, on the model of 
the then recent University of London, which, 
unlike Oxford and Cambridge, has no residential 
colleges but is mainly a teaching and examining 
body. The Indians, as was their wont, looked of 


{ 126 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


course to the government to provide them with 
educational facilities, and the Education Depart- 
ment became one of the most important of govern- 
ment departments. 

Looking back now, it is easy to see the weak 
points of an educational system too closely and 
mechanically modeled on our own for such a 
widely different country as India. In the first 
place, it was concentrated mainly upon higher 
education, and began from the top, in the over- 
sanguine belief that education would ultimately 
filter down from the higher to the lower strata of 
Indian society, with the result that it tended 
to widen the gulf between the educated urban 
classes and the great peasant masses forming 
three-quarters of the whole population, who 
remained as they had been, time immemorial, 
absolutely illiterate and sunk in ancient depths 
of ignorance. Instruction in the various courses, 
mostly literary, which were held to constitute 
higher education, was conveyed solely through 
the medium of English, which in extremely few 
cases was spoken or even understood in the homes 
of the students, who were to great extent, as a 
rule, largely estranged from their families. 

As the government of India deemed itself 
bound to maintain complete neutrality in all 


{ 127 J 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


matters of religion, education was not only strictly 
undenominational and absolutely divorced from 
religious teaching, but also very largely from all 
moral training and discipline. It was, in fact, 
mainly confined to the training of the intellect, 
and could do little for the vital side of education, 
which consists of the forming of character. 
Such criticisms apply only in part to the excellent 
educational work of the missionaries—quite a 
few of them Americans—which has in some parts 
of India extended also to the masses. But they, 
too, were bound to a system in which examinations 
tended to become the one supreme test and the 
results to be judged too often rather by quantity 
than by quality. 

But with all its shortcomings, the system did 
great things. In a country where there are 
twenty quite different languages, each spoken 
by millions of people, besides an immense number 
of minor dialects, the teaching of English as the 
common tongue of all the Western-educated 
classes created a bond of unity which the peoples of 
India had never before possessed. The Western- 
educated Indian began to fill all the subordinate 
branches of the administration and all the liberal 
professions, and to have a distinct mentality of 
hisown. But he remained essentially a townsman, 


{ 128 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


and his influence at first was slight outside the 
great cities in which his own interests centered. 
Another result followed which might have been 
foreseen but was not. You could not make 
textbooks out of the speeches of Burke and Fox 
and out of Mill “On Liberty” and expound the 
history of British political institutions “‘broad- 
based on freedom” to a highly intelligent race 
without inoculating it with the germs of political 
liberty and even of nationhood. Western-educated 
Indians not unnaturally began to demand a 
larger participation in the control of the public 
affairs of their own country, and a larger share 
in the official bureaucracy. But the distrust 
engendered by the mutiny had obscured the earlier 
vision of men like Munro, who looked forward 
to the time when England should have trained 
Indians to govern and protect themselves. The 
latter were no doubt still unfit, but Englishmen 
were less willing than before the mutiny to believe 
that they could ever be made fit. Racial feeling 
had been revived and embittered, and on the 
British side it showed itself, for instance, strong 
enough to compel the viceroy, Lord Ripon, to 
yield to the clamor of Englishmen in India, 
official as well as unofficial, and water down the 
famous Ilbert Bill of 1883, which, with the full 


[ 129 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


approval of the Liberal British government at 
home, had been drafted for the redress of certain 
racial inequalities in forms of judicial procedure. 
That unfortunate episode led to a momentous 
parting of the ways. 

In the following year, a small group of progres- 
sive Indians, though still thoroughly devoted to 
the British connection, founded the Indian 
National Congress as an informal parliament to 
ventilate Indian grievances and to appeal to 
British opinion at home in England, over the head 
of the constituted government of India in whom 
they had lost faith. Englishmen, official and 
unofficial, instead of lending them a helping and 
guiding hand, which might have kept the Congress 
on permanently constitutional lines, viewed that 
movement with suspicion and resentment, and 
drove it almost inevitably into more and more 
vehement opposition which has grown today into 
open and bitter antagonism. 

But there was this excuse for the British atti- 
tude toward the Indian National Congress, that 
it represented from the outset only that small 
section of Indians who had been brought together 
by common contact with the Occident and were 
scarcely at all in touch with the great rural masses, 
while the Mohammedans held for a long time 


[ 130 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


entirely aloof from it. It served, however, as a 
focus for every form of discontent and, before 
the present century was many years old, British 
rule had to reckon not only with the reactionary 
forces banded together against all the liberal 
tendencies of Western education, but with a 
stream of revolutionary forces claiming to draw 
their inspiration from the Occident, but un- 
fortunately just from those parts of the Occident 
where revolutionary methods were regarded as 
alone capable of effecting political and social 
progress. These revolutionary forces were recruited 
mainly amongst immature youths who distorted 
the meaning of their schoolroom lessons or were 
embittered by failure in their examinations and 
the consequent closing against them of the avenues 
to lucrative employment and especially to official 
employment by the state which they had been apt to 
regard as the assured reward of Western education. 

The same sort of intellectual proletariat grew 
up in India that has provided the rank and file 
of revolutionary movements in many European 
countries. Young Indians, who borrowed the 
doctrines and the bombs of Russian anarchism, 
formed themselves into secret societies dedicated 
to the goddess Kali, the dark and sanguinary 
consort of Shiva, the god of destruction; and to 


[131 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


all the increasing manifestations of Indian dis- 
content on more constitutional lines was added 
an epidemic of political assassinations of which the 
victims were not only British officials but Indians 
whose only crime was that they were loyal servants 
of government. 

The emergence of Japan and her resounding 
victories in Manchuria against a great European 
power helped at the same time to undermine the 
Indian belief in the material invincibility of the 
Occident. Western-educated public opinion in 
India grew demonstratively impatient at the 
tardiness and inadequacy of the concessions with 
which the British government had hitherto met 
the Indians’ demand for a larger share in the 
administration and government of their country. 
They were not satisfied with municipal institutions 
kept in official leading strings or with the small 
legislative councils which gave to Indian members 
little more than a consultative voice in public 
affairs, or with the admission of a mere sprinkling 
of Indians in the higher branches of the public 
services, though the lower branches were already 
almost exclusively manned by Indians. 

Public opinion in England was perplexed and 
alarmed, but with the advent of a liberal govern- 
ment in 1906 and John Morley’s appointment to 


{ 132 ] 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


the India office, a serious attempt was made to 
meet Indian desires. The Indian Councils Act 
of 1909 gave a large extension of powers both to 
the central and provincial legislatures, and Indians 
were for the first time appointed to the viceroy’s 
Executive Council, hitherto the citadel of British 
authority in India, and to the India Council in 
London, also until then a stronghold of the 
Anglo-Indian bureaucracy. These measures were 
at first warmly welcomed in India, and when 
King George and Queen Mary paid at the end 
of 1g1i their first visit to their Indian Empire as 
reigning sovereigns, they were greeted with uni- 
versal enthusiasm, carried in some places to the 
embarrassing lengths of that semi-divine worship 
which Hindu tradition accords to kingship. 

But the great waves of emotion which sweep 
over India often subside as rapidly, and the worst 
revolutionary elements were shown to be still 
in being when just a year afterward a bomb 
was thrown with very nearly mortal effect at the 
viceroy, Lord Hardinge, while he was making his 
state entry into Delhi, which the king-emperor 
had himself proclaimed to be the new capital of 
his Indian Empire. 

Political agitation was once more acute when 
the Great War broke out. Then it was suddenly 


{ 133 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


hushed and England herself was astonished at 
the wonderful outburst of loyalty among the 
princes and peoples of India. They were, above 
all, proud to see the Indian Army sent to Europe 
to fight shoulder to shoulder with the British 
Army in France, and right gallantly did it help 
to hold up the Germans during the very critical 
winter of 1914-15. Asquith, who was then prime 
minister, gave genuine expression to England’s 
gratitude when he declared that Indian questions 
would henceforth have to be approached from 
“‘a new angle of vision.” But in the protracted 
stress of war, the fulfilment of that promise was 
so long delayed that within the next two years 
all the old discontents flamed up afresh in the 
shape of another raging and tearing campaign, 
this time for immediate Swaraj, an elastic term 
which, though it may mean only local self- 
government, was then clearly intended to mean 
complete autonomy or even absolute independence. 
British ministers were compelled by urgent appeals 
from the government of India itself to lay their 
war-maps aside for a moment and remember 
Asquith’s pledge. 

In August, 1917, Montagu, a radical statesman 
who had lately gone to the India office, in Lloyd 
George’s coalition government, made the most 


{ 134] 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


momentous declaration which the British Parlia- 
ment had ever listened to in connection with 
India. The purpose of British policy in India 
was to be henceforth, he stated, 

not only the increasing association of Indians in every branch 
of the administration, but also the greatest development of 
self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive 
realisation of responsible government in India as an integral 


part of the British Empire. 


He himself proceeded shortly afterward to India 
and drew up, in consultation not only with the 
viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, but with representative 
Indians of all political complexions, an exhaustive 
report which served as a basis for the great 
Government of India Bill adopted by both 
Houses of Parliament at the end of 1919. 

That measure embodied profound constitu- 
tional changes in the government and administra- 
tion of India. It endowed India with representa- 
tive institutions in the shape of an all-Indian 
legislature as well as provincial bodies, in which the 
Indians were assured of an elected majority. 
The ultimate responsibility of the British govern- 
ment was fully safeguarded, but in the Indian 
provincial governments large fields of administra- 
tion were transferred to Indian ministers respon- 
sible to their provincial legislatures, and even the 


{135 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


supreme executive government of India with 
almost half of its members henceforth Indian had 
henceforth to reckon, for the first time, with a 
great Indian popular assembly. A great impetus 
was given at the same time to the Indianization 
of all the public services, which is now steadily 
proceeding. The elections took place in the follow- 
ing year, 1920, and the Duke of Connaught, sent 
out to represent the king at the opening of the new 
legislatures, delivered a royal message in which 
King George did not hesitate himself to use the 
word Swaraj that had come to be regarded by 
British officialdom in India as an almost openly 
seditious war-cry: | 

For years—it may be for generations—patriotic and 
loyal Indians have dreamed of Swaraj for their motherland. 
Today you have the beginnings of Swaraj within my Empire, 
and the widest scope and ample opportunity for progress to 
the liberty which my other Dominions enjoy. 

This new constitutional charter represents 
the boldest attempt that has ever yet been made 
to graft political institutions of the democratic 
Occident on an ancient and still vital form of 
oriental civilization. A disastrous combination of 
circumstances tended to jeopardize the success 
of this great experiment at its very inception. 
It was fiercely denounced by the extreme national- 


[ 136 ] 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


ists, for whom it did not go far enough to satisfy 
their dream of complete Indian independence, 
and by the old reactionaries, who resented any 
endeavor to build up the framework of modern 
European institutions on the ancient and sacred 
soil of Hinduism, which was supposed to have 
enjoyed a golden age—quite mythical—of wealth 
and knowledge and freedom beyond all nations 
of the earth before the Occident broke in upon it. 

Out of these conflicting discontents there 
suddenly emerged the magnetic personality of 
Mahatma Gandhi, whose ascetic life and prophetic 
eloquence invested a widespread movement of 
revolt against the Occident with something of 
a religious halo in a country where religion is still 
a supremely vital force. A Hindu, but of the 
somewhat lowly caste of Bunnias, or traders, 
he had received a thorough Western education and 
had been called to the bar in London. But he 
had been embittered against the Occident first 
by the hardships which he had seen inflicted on 
his fellow-Indians in South Africa under the plea 
of preserving the superiority of the white race, 
and more recently by the harsh methods of re- 
pression employed in the Punjab after the revolu- 
tionary outbreak of April, 1919, and especially 
by General Dyer’s ruthless action at Amritzar, 


{ 137 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


of which it may be said, to borrow the Duke of 
Connaught’s weighty language, “the shadow has 
lengthened over the face of India.” 

For Gandhi it was not merely British rule in 
India but Western civilization itself that was 
“Satanic.” Against every manifestation of that 
civilization he exhorted his people to rebel and 
as a first step to refuse any sort of co-operation 
with government and to boycott the elections 
for the new representative assemblies. He urged 
them equally to shun modern schools and law 
courts, and even hospitals, as “Satanic,” and he 
would have them shun as equally “Satanic”’ all 
the inventions and appliances of modern science, 
and above all every form of modern industry. 
What he would have India return to besides the 
domestic spinning-wheel and homespun clothes 
is hard to say. I had one long and interesting 
talk with him but I vainly tried to obtain from 
him some picture of what India would be like 
under Swaraj, as he understood it. He spoke 
vaguely of restoring the old Indian village com- 
munity, with its Panchayats, or Councils of 
Elders, in which justice would be dispensed “in 
accordance with the conscience of India,” and of 
substituting for ponderous school and college 
buildings ‘‘as stifling to the boy’s body as modern 


{ 138 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


educational processes are to his soul,” simpler struc- 
tures “open to God’s air and light” in which 
“the learning of their forefathers would make 
free men of them once more.” Then, quit of 
railways and telegraphs and all other instruments 
and symbols of Western economic bondage, 
India, he assured me, would return to the pristine 
felicity of prehistoric Vedic times. All this was 
to be achieved by soul force, and he himself 
constantly preached non-violence. 

Yet this Hindu prophet and apostle of non- 
violence was induced to throw his mantle over a 
purely Mohammedan movement in support of 
Turkey engineered by Indian Mohammedans, 
who barely did lip-worship to his doctrine of 
non-violence. The leaders of the Indian khalifate 
movement belonged to the new school of Moham- 
medans, who, turning their backs upon the old 
traditions of their community, had joined hands 
in the National Congress with the Hindu extremists 
for the subversion of British rule. Some of them, 
and notably the brothers, Mohamed and Shau-kat 
Ali, had been in contact with the Young Turks 
before the war, and as they refused to give any 
assurances of loyalty when the war broke out, 
they had been interned for its duration. Released 
after the war, they had seen their opportunity 


[ 139 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


in the difficulties which the resurgence of Turkey 
created for the Allies andespecially for Great Britain. 

But they could not hope to carry the bulk of 
their co-religionists with them unless they affixed 
a religious label to their pro-Turkish campaign. 
That label was the khalifate. The Occident, 
they preached, was banded together under the 
leadership of Britain to destroy Islam by robbing 
the sultan of Turkey of the territorial and temporal 
power essential to the discharge of his spiritual 
duties as khalif. It was an adroit move and 
singularly successful. A hundred years ago the 
Indian Mohammedans knew little about Turkey. 
It was indeed the British rulers of India who 
themselves first magnified Turkey in the eyes of 
the Indian Mohammedans when they courted their 
support during the Crimean War, and again when 
Lord Beaconsfield sent an Indian force to Malta 
in 1878 in anticipation of another war against 
Russia in defense of Turkey. 

Abdul Hamid’s Pan-Islamic propaganda did 
not make any very widespread impression in 
India, though he had started it there as far back 
as 1884, but it was not wholly ineffective, and. 
things happened before the Great War—more 
especially the Italian invasion of Tripoli and the 
Balkan wars—to fill the whole Mohammedan 


[ 140 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


world with deep anxiety as to the future of all 
Islamic states. All this was for a time almost 
forgotten during the Great War, though the revolt 
of the sherif of Mecca against Turkey shocked 
many Indian Mohammedans as an act of treachery 
to Islam. The khalifate propaganda in favor of 
Turkey did not, at any rate, fall upon entirely 
unreceptive ears, On the contrary, it very soon 
assumed proportions which so seriously alarmed 
both Delhi and London that the British Empire 
had finally to join in the collective surrender 
at Lausanne with which I have dealt in one of 
my previous lectures. 

Gandhi, without stopping to probe the merits 
of the case, bestowed his blessing on the khalifate 
movement as a great demonstration of religious 
faith on the part of his Mohammedan fellow- 
countrymen. He, of course, did not fail to preach 
to them the duty of non-violence. But he had 
reckoned without the militant spirit of Islam, 
and the khalifate movement was responsible 
for more outbreaks of violence than Gandhi’s 
own Hindu revivalist campaigns. The rising of 
Mohammedan Moplahs on the Malabar coast, 
in 1921, recalled the worst atrocities perpetrated 
by the early Mohammedan conquerors of India 
many centuries ago. It was nominally directed at 


{ 141 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


first against British rule, but the Moplahs promptly 
turned upon their Hindu neighbors whom they 
either slaughtered and plundered ruthlessly or com- 
pelled at the point of the sword to embrace Moham- 
medanism, until British troops came to their rescue. 

The lesson was not lost on the Hindus in other 
parts of India, and many of them learned to 
dread a return to the old days of Mohammedan 
domination if ever India’s connection with Britain 
were finally severed. One of the leading Hindu 
extremists in Bengal has sought this year to devise 
a pact which would secure continued co-operation 
between Hindus and Mohammedans for the 
attainment of Indian independence, but in spite 
of his great personal influence its terms have been 
indignantly rejected by a large proportion of 
Hindus as far too favorable to the Mohammedans 
whose prestige has suffered at the same time 
grievously from the Turkish change of front and 
the abolition of the khalifate at Angora. The 
relations between the two communities are perhaps 
more strained than ever at the present day, and 
the British power alone prevents them from fly- 
ing at each other’s throats. 

An intolerable strain was put upon the forbear- 
ance which the government of India had extended 
to the non-co-operative movement when Gandhi 


{ 142 } 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


proclaimed the boycott of the Prince of Wales’s 
visit to India eighteen months ago. Though some 
violent rioting occurred as soon as he landed in 
Bombay, the boycott was on the whole a failure. 
But Gandhi himself admitted that the government 
was acting entirely within its rights when it at 
last had him arrested and placed on his trial as a 
persistent disturber of the public peace. He was 
condemned to two years’ imprisonment, but he 
was released this winter before the end of his term 
on grounds of ill-health, and having recovered 
from his illness, he has now promptly revived his 
original program, including passive resistance and 
at some future date a general refusal to pay taxes. 
But during his imprisonment other and _ less 
unworldly spirits had been fighting to get control 
of the movement which he had started. 

Three years ago Gandhi had banned all 
participation in the elections to the new repre- 
sentative assemblies, but he failed, and the new 
assemblies showed, on the whole, a great deal of 
capacity and discretion. At the second general 
election held at the end of 1923 many of his 
former followers, disregarding his injunctions, 
stood for election and were returned, largely at 
the expense of the more moderate Indians who 
had accepted the reforms as at least a first and 


{ 143 |} 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


material step toward dominion self-government 
in India. The avowed purpose of this change of 
front on the part of the Extremists is to wreck 
from inside the assemblies the constitutional 
scheme of reforms which Gandhi had failed to 
wreck from outside. But he is not to be moved 
from his old position, and the breach between 
him and the new school has been widened by a 
sensational demonstration which more directly 
than anything that has yet happened challenges 
his doctrine of non-violence. A few months ago 
a young Bengali student murdered an inoffensive 
English merchant in Calcutta whom he admitted 
to have mistaken for a British official. It was a 
dastardly crime, but the provincial branch of 
the Indian National Congress actually passed a 
resolution commending the murderer for his pa- 
triotic devotion, and passed it with the support of 
the new Swarajist leader, Das, who seems to have 
now set himself up almost openly against Gandhi. 

It is not by such methods, though they may 
produce in some a feeling akin to despair or provoke 
others to advocate hasty and unworthy reprisals, 
that Englishmen’s patient faith in their capacity 
to train Indians to govern and protect themselves 
will be seriously shaken. Have they not, after 
all, succeeded already in training them to play 


{ 144 ] 


THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA 


a great part today in every field of the new 
India’s life? Indians today are members of the 
executive government at Delhi and in the prov- 
inces. They are judges of the high courts, and 
one of them even sits on the judicial committee 
Opener bia, Council) at. /home.).) There ‘19; /an 
Indian high commissioner in London, and Indians 
sit on the Council of the secretary of state for 
India, in Whitehall. There is no position in the 
great public services to which Indians cannot 
aspire on terms of equality with Englishmen. 
There are among them men of letters and of science 
whose names are honorably known throughout the 
Occident. They are rapidly becoming the captains 
of industry and commerce. All these we can claim 
as the intellectual offspring of Western education 
which the British rule brought withit. We clearly 
have to do our duty by them. 

But we have also a duty toward the scores of 
millions of inarticulate Indians, who if they know 
nothing else of the Occident, have learned to put 
their trust in British rule as that which divides 
them least and is best able to hold the balance 
between all their conflicting creeds, castes, and 
races. There are only 120,000 Englishmen in 
India, including the British garrisons—the merest 
handful among a population of 320,000,000—and 


{ 145 } 


¢ 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


it is certainly not by the sword alone that they 
can hold the fort for Western civilization, not in 
India alone but throughout the Orient. For it is 
not in India alone but all over the Orient that the 
prestige of the Occident has suffered grievously 
from the spectacle which it presents today of a 
battered and bleeding Europe. 

The critical period of -transition in India, 
which was precipitated by the Great War, may 
prove longer and more difficult than was antici- 
pated when India received five years ago her great 
constitutional charter, and the relatively small 
but undeniably influential class of Indians upon 
whom it conferred unprecedented constitutional 
powers have been slower to learn how to exercise 
them constitutionally. But it is all part of the — 
great experiment upon which Britain entered a 
hundred years ago when she gave Western educa- 
tion to India, and she owes it not only to herself 
but to the Indians, and even to those who now 
revile her, to go through with it. For upon the 
success or failure of an experiment conducted 
on so vast a scale, involving the future of a great 
subcontinent, inhabited by nearly a fifth of the 
human race, depends more than upon anything 
else in the Orient the peaceful readjustment of its 
relations with the Occident. 


{ 146 } 


V 
PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 





V 
PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


The proclamation of a British protectorate 
in Egypt took place under such exceptional war 
conditions that it cannot be regarded as typical 
of the systems of European protectorates over 
oriental states which grew up in the latter part 
of the nineteenth century as an alternative 
to annexation pure and simple. The germs may 
be found in the treaties of subordinate alliance 
concluded much earlier in that century between 
many of the Indian native states and the British 
government of India, which secure to the latter 
absolute control over foreign relations and to the 
Indian princes the maintenance of their hereditary 
rights of rulership and a large measure of autonomy 
in regard to internal administration so long as 
they conform to minimum standards of decent 
and humane government. 

It is the French who in recent times have 
applied that system with perhaps the greatest 
success. Whereas when they occupied Algiers 
in 1830 they ended by annexing Algeria and 


1 149 J 


‘ 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


assimilating its administration largely to that of 
continental France, they were content in 1881 to 
establish a protectorate over the adjoining territory 
of Tunis, taking over control of its foreign relations 
and to a lesser extent of its internal administration, 
but maintaining the hereditary rights and formal 
authority of its ruler under French overlordship. 
Protectorates have been established on similar 
lines by the British over Zanzibar and other parts 
of tropical Africa, which do not come within my 
purview. The most useful illustration I can take 
is, I think, the French protectorate established 
in Ig12 over the greater part of Morocco; for 
Morocco has had altogether a peculiarly interesting 
history. 

Unlike Egypt and indeed unlike all the rest 
of the Arab world which had shared in the brilliant 
Mohammedan civilization of the early Middle 
Ages, Morocco escaped Turkish domination, 
though the Ottoman Empire once stretched 
along the southern shores of the Mediterranean 
almost to her doors. Thus when the Moors were 
finally driven out of Spain and retired to their own 
country in a sheltered corner of northwest Africa 
they were left in possession of their national 
independence and of the memories at least of 
the glorious age in which their forebears had 


[ 150 } 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


ruled in Spain. The people of Morocco converted 
to Islam when the Arab followers of Mohammed 
swept them along with them to the conquest of 
Spain never had and have not today much Arab 
blood in them; for the majority of them, especially 
on and beyond the great Atlas range, are Berbers 
of north African stock, speaking their own north 
African tongue, and while professing Moham- 
medanism, still in a very primitive stage of tribal 
evolution, in which ancient tribal custom refuses 
as yet to yield even to Mohammedan canon law. 
But Arabic is still the polite language of Morocco, 
and whatever of civilization endures in Morocco 
derives from the Arab civilization of Spain and is 
indeed still commonly called Andalusian. 

The noblest surviving monument of its ancient 
glory, the Kutubia at Marrakesh, was built by 
the same Arab architect who reared the Giralda 
at Seville. The beautiful Medersas of Fez belong 
to the same order, and all that is best in the arts 
and crafts of Morocco is still rightly termed 
Andalusian. Some of the great Moorish families 
are reputed to have still in their possession the 
keys of the houses in which their ancestors lived 
in Seville or Granada. Others pride themselves 
on a common ancestry with distinguished families 
of Arab descent still living in France and Spain. 


{151 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


When I was in Morocco last winter I paid my 
respects to the governor of Rabat, Mohamed 
Burgash, a dignified old gentleman of ancient 
Arab lineage, who told me that two branches of 
his family were still extant in Southern Europe, 
both now of course Christian, the one Spanish, 
the other French. 

The Moors are a proud race, and they have 
not forgotten the bitter story of their expulsion 
from Spain. The University of Fez, founded a 
thousand years ago, is today still a stronghold 
of Mohammedan orthodoxy, and in Fez, which is 
the northern capital, there lingers perhaps more 
than in any other Moorish city a subtle atmosphere 
of inherited anti-Christian and anti-European hos- 
tility. 

They never owed allegiance either temporal 
or spiritual to the Turkish sultans, and though 
they have passed through stormy periods of 
internal strife, they have always had their own 
independent sultans who have been also their 
khalifs in complete disregard of all the Turkish 
sultans’ claims to the khalifate. They set their 
face equally against the Occident, and if occidental 
nations like the Spaniards and the Portuguese 
sometimes got a foothold on their coast—England 
held Tangier for twenty inglorious years as part 


[ 152} 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


of the dowry which Catherine of Braganza brought 
to King Charles I[—the Barbary pirates from the 
Atlantic ports of Morocco boldly raided across 
the ocean and often on to the very coasts of 
England all through the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries. Tens of thousands of Europeans were 
carried away as captives to Morocco and sold 
into slavery. Some of them, having embraced 
their new masters’ faith, rose to high positions 
in which their Western knowledge was frequently 
put to use. Foreign trade, too, was somehow 
maintained in the coast towns even in the worst 
days of piracy, and foreign merchants were allowed 
to reside there, some of them with consular 
privileges. 

But the sultans of Morocco rarely demeaned 
themselves to hold diplomatic intercourse with 
the infidels, and when representatives of the 
foreign powers came to reside at Tangier, they 
were held there at arms’ length, and, even when 
they occasionally braved the difficulties of a long 
journey through a roadless country to the Moorish 
court at Fez or Marrakesh, in order to present 
their credentials or to settle outstanding questions, 
they had, until quite the end of the last century, 
to stand bareheaded and on foot in the presence 
of the sultan when he gave them their first public 


[153] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


reception in his camp, while he himself sat on his 
horse under his great umbrella of state. 

Even when a hundred years ago the conquest 
of Algeria first gave Morocco a European neighbor, 
her aloofness from the West was only temporarily 
disturbed, and she continued to stagnate in her 
own medieval backwater until it was stirred by 
the uninvited intrusion of European powers in 
quest originally of new markets for their increasing 
industrial output. The rivalry between France 
and Britain, who were with Spain the first to 
appear on the scene, soon, however, ceased to be 
purely economic, as besides her commercial interests 
Britain as a naval power could not remain indiffer- 
ent to the fate of Morocco who held one side of the 
Straits of Gibraltar and had a long and strategically 
important seaboard on the western Atlantic. 

France, on the other hand, with her great 
possessions reaching to the borders of Morocco 
on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and 
stretching across the Sahara toward her growing 
West African colonies on the Atlantic, held that 
she had equal if not superior claims to political 
ascendancy in the northwest corner of Africa 
which she had already almost enveloped. Spain 
also had ambitions in Morocco, but she was 
relatively a negligible quantity, and France and 


[154] 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


Britain wisely settled their differences when the 
German emperor suddenly entered the lists and 
threatened to cast his sword into the scales. In 
the Anglo-French Convention of 1904, which 
covered the whole field of Anglo-French overseas 
rivalry, France undertook to leave Britain a free 
hand in Egypt in exchange for the British recog- 
nition of superior French interests in Morocco. 
Germany had until then hardly ever concerned 
herself with Morocco, where even her commercial 
interests were insignificant. For a whole year she 
nursed in silence her resentment of the Anglo- 
French agreement. Then in 1905 William II’s 
demonstrative visit to Tangier was the crowning 
incident in a systematic campaign of intimidation 
against France in which Germany put the question 
of Morocco in the foreground—almost to the point 
of war—as the acid test of Franco-British friend- 
ship in the hope of driving in a wedge between 
France and Britain before their renewed intimacy 
had had time to consolidate. This hope was 
doomed to speedy disappointment, for, though 
France yielded so far as to agree to the Moroccan 
question’s being referred to an international con- 
ference at Algeciras, France and England made 
common cause there, and Germany was fain to 
accept the compromise offered to her in the shape 


[155 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


of an understanding for joint co-operation in the 
development of Morocco’s economic resources. 

The political independence of Morocco was, 
however, still nominally intact, and she might 
have saved herself had she taken time by the 
forelock and put her house in order. But of 
this she was incapable. Only the religious fanati- 
cism of her people reacted against the interference 
of infidel powers, and early in 1g11 a general rising 
of the tribes against the sultan, Mulai Hafid, 
assumed such proportions that at his instance 
the French sent an expedition from Algeria to 
relieve the beleaguered city of Fez. Then followed 
another acute crisis, which again brought Europe 
to the verge of war when Germany challenged 
the action of France by sending the German 
cruiser “‘Panther” to the faraway port of Agadir 
in which German interests were nil. This was 
a more threatening demonstration than even 
the emperor’s visit to Tangier six years before and 
was equally intended to test Anglo-French rela- 
tions. It failed again, and once more Germany 
was fain to accept a compromise by which in 
return for a transfer of territory in the French 
Congo to Germany the latter recognized a French 
political protectorate over Morocco, economic 
equality alone being reaffirmed. 


{ 156 } 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


In 1912 the sultan, Mulai Hafid, signed the 
treaty by which he formally accepted the French 
protectorate, but only after a fresh period of 
serious disturbance and risings, directed as much 
against an unpopular and worthless ruler as against 
the French infidels, did the Moorish people as a 
whole resign themselves to the protectorate. 
Even to the present day the Berber tribesmen of 
the Atlas Mountains maintain a desultory struggle 
against it in the same spirit in which they have 
fought from time immemorial against every at- 
tempt on the part of their own sultans to enforce 
any settled form of government upon them. 

Tangier, which almost faces Gibraltar on the 
Straits, has been recently placed under a separate 
international administration, and south of it 
there is a narrow Spanish zone extending from 
the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in which the 
Spaniards are still engaged in fighting down, 
sometimes with disastrous results to themselves, 
the stubborn resistance of the Riff tribesmen in 
their almost inaccessible mountain fastnesses. 
The French protectorate extends over the rest, 
1.e., nine-tenths of Morocco, or roughly the same 
area as that of continental France. 

The success of a protectorate depends very 
much upon the spirit in which it is administered. 


{ 157] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


The French have been fortunate enough to find 
in Marshal Lyautey an agent who laid himself out 
from the very first to make their protectorate 
acceptable to the Moorish people. Though essen- 
tially a soldier, Lyautey combines the gift of 
broad and far-sighted statesmanship with a rare 
combination of energy and patience and an 
abundance of human sympathy. For him the 
protectorate has been no mere diplomatic figment 
invented to disguise an alien domination imposed 
by force. Soon after he had been appointed 
resident general he formulated his conception 
of a protectorate as 


a system under which the country preserves its own institu- 
tions and governs and administers itself through its own 
organs under the mere general control of a power, who, 
having taken charge of its foreign relations, assumes the 
general direction of its military forces and finances and 
economic development. The dominant characteristic of a 
protectorate is control as opposed to direct administration. 


In Mulai Hafid’s successor, Mulai Yusef, the 
present sultan, Marshal Lyautey has found a 
ruler who has loyally accepted that interpretation 
of a protectorate. 

Marshal Lyautey seeks and generally follows 
the sultan’s advice in matters not only affecting 
the internal administration of the country which 


{ 158 J 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


is left very largely in the hands of the sultan’s 
officials, but also in those which he might well 
regard as reserved to the discretion of the protect- 
ing power. It has, in fact, been the marshal’s 
policy to maintain and even to enhance the sultan’s 
position as both a temporal and spiritual ruler. 
The restoration of law and order to an extent 
which no ruler had ever achieved in former times 
has already been carried so far that the sultan 
can now make a peaceful progress through many 
parts of his dominions into which he would never 
have ventured before, except at the head of a 
large army recruited mainly by the promise of 
plunder. 

It must inevitably be a strain upon the con- 
science of orthodox Mohammedans to see their 
khalif acquiesce in the protectorate of an infidel 
power, but the strain has been relieved in Morocco 
not only by the misfortunes which have overtaken 
a rival khalif in Turkey, but still more by the 
scrupulous regard which the French, and the 
marshal first and foremost, have always shown for 
their religious and social customs. Just as before 
the occupation, no non-Mohammedan is allowed 
to enter their mosques; the seclusion in which 
they keep their women is respected; their own 
law courts sit as of old for the administration of 


{ 159 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


justice in accordance with Mohammedan Sacred 
Law. Ordinary relations between Frenchmen 
and Moors are as a rule friendly and often cordial, 
and in this respect Frenchmen doubtless have an 
advantage over Englishmen as they seem to be 
almost entirely free from the color ' prejudice 
which has grown upon us nowadays considerably. 
They have even sought to bring their new public 
buildings into harmony with Moorish architecture, 
while they have established a strong claim on the 
gratitude of the Moors by taking in hand and 
carrying out most admirably under the expert 
direction of their deaux arts the restoration of the 
ancient monuments which the Moors themselves 
with all their piety were allowing to fall into decay. 

The French no doubt keep a firm hold upon 
the country, but with singularly little display of 
military force. There have been no regular 
French troops in Morocco since the early part of 
the Great War when Lyautey took the risk of 
releasing them for the Western front. Since 
then he has relied entirely on African troops, 
some of them raised in Morocco, but mostly 
Tunisian, Algerian, and Senegalese, and their 
only European stiffening is provided by the Foreign 
Legion, a peculiar force recruited entirely from 
volunteers of all nationalities of whom, strangely 


[ 160 } 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


enough, 65 per cent are today Germans. During 
the war practically all who were not Germans 
were sent over to fight in France, and Lyautey 
likes to boast, laughingly, that throughout the 
war he held Morocco for France with his Africans 
and his own Germans. 

To those who do not understand the German 
mentality, it must seem almost incredible that 
since the war Germans have been tumbling over 
one another to be accepted for service in the French 
Foreign Legion. Their French officers admit that 
they make excellent soldiers, and only a few months 
ago Marshal Lyautey recognized the gallantry 
displayed by one of them in the fighting last 
summer in the Atlas Mountains by bestowing 
on him the French Military Medal which he, 
a former officer in the German Army (I believe 
in the Prussian Guards), now wears as well as 
the German Iron Cross for the Great War. 

I have not time to dwell on what the French 
have done within the short span of twelve years 
since the establishment of the French protectorate 
for the material development of the country. 
Splendid roads for motor traffic now connect all 
the chief cities; the railways which were originally 
built for military purposes are being transformed 
and extended for general purposes; they have 


{ 161 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


made new ports and harbors, and laid out new 
towns, generally quite outside the Moorish walled 
cities so as to diminish the chance of friction be- 
tween the newcomers and the Moorish population; 
they have created schools and hospitals, of which 
the Moors are beginning to appreciate the value. 

Everything, however, bears the impress of one 
great personality, and when Marshal Lyautey re- 
tires—an event which cannot be far off in view of 
his advancing years and frequent ill-health—one 
wonders whether the French will find for him a 
successor capable of carrying on his work on the 
same lines. Perhaps the greatest tribute to 
him is the anxiety which prevails on this subject 
among the Moors themselves. He has had one 
singular advantage in carrying out his great 
experiment. All he has had to contend with, 
besides the impatience sometimes of his own people 
who would prefer the more drastic methods 
that obtain in other French dependencies, is the 
innate conservatism of a Mohammedan country 
to whose religious and social customs our Western 
civilization is necessarily repugnant. He has not 
had to reckon with the cross-currents which a 
growing familiarity with the history and traditions 
and political conceptions of the Occident tends to 
create in many other oriental countries. 


{ 162 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


The French are now importing Western 
education into Morocco where hitherto it was 
almost unknown, but they are doing so slowly 
and very cautiously in order to avoid the pitfalls 
which have beset it elsewhere in the Orient. 
Lyautey wants to carry Mohammedan opinion 
with him, and he can claim to have achieved a 
remarkable success in securing the consent and 
even to some extent the good will of the ancient 
University of Fez for a new Mohammedan college 
under French direction with a broad modern 
curriculum. But, dreading to create a_half- 
educated semi-Europeanized intellectual prole- 
tariat, he is anxious that Western education, 
primary as well as secondary, should not outrun 
the capacity of the country to absorb its products 
and provide sufficient openings for their useful 
employment. 

For the present, however, Morocco knows 
nothing of the ferment of Western education 
which has been already long at work upon many 
other oriental peoples, and has engendered among 
them political aspirations and discontents directly 
derived from the Occident. Hardly the remotest 
breath of the Occident had passed over Morocco 
until the French went in and built up an occidental 
framework around the weather-beaten structure 


[ 163 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


of an ancient oriental civilization which they have 
hitherto been at great pains not to disturb. 

In Morocco the protectorate system is seen 
at its best as a milder substitute for the older and 
more forceful methods of annexation. But even 
there it stands for the definite subordination of an 
oriental country to the paramount authority of a 
single European power. Since the Great War, 
on the other hand, a distinctly progressive step 
has been taken in other parts of the Orient for 
the readjustment of the relations between the 
Occident and the Orient by the creation of the 
mandatory system and its application, imperfect 
as it still is, to the Arab provinces detached from 
the Ottoman Empire. 

When the Allied and Associated Powers met 
together at the Paris Peace Conference, one of the 
most important questions with which they were 
faced was the disposal of the territories outside 
Europe of which the enemy states were to be 
permanently dispossessed. It was, I think quite 
wisely, recognized that those territories could not 
properly be handed over to any one of the victori- 
ous powers, and when the League of Nations took 
shape, on President Wilson’s initiative, it opened 
up a new solution of the problem. Article 22 of 
the Covenant declared that in such territories 


{ 164 ] 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


as were inhabited by peoples not yet able to 
stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions 
of the modern world, their well-being and develop- 
ment should form a sacred trust of civilization, 
and that the best method of giving practical 
effect to that principle was to intrust the tutelage 
of such peoples to advanced nations who by 
reason of their resources, their experience, or their 
geographical position could best undertake that 
responsibility and were willing to exercise it as 
mandatories on behalf of the League. 

As I am concerned here merely with the 
provinces detached from the Ottoman Empire, 
I need only quote the paragraph that deals 
specifically with them. It runs: 


They have reached a stage of development where their 
existence as independent nations can be provisionally rec- 
ognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice 
and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are 
able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must 
be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory. 


Not only was the mandatory system largely 
due to President Wilson’s inspiration, but the 
word “‘mandate”’ was, in fact, used for the first 
time in this connection by an American writer, 
_George Louis Beer, in an essay written before 
the war was over with special reference to the 


[ 165 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


future of Mesopotamia, and it is in Mesopotamia, 
now called Iraq, that the system has had its 
fairest trial. 

It was the British armies that drove the Turks 
out of Mesopotamia, and they remained in 
occupation. The rough and ready system of 
administration, not always very wise, which the 
military authorities extemporized on the spot, 
created all the more disappointment in that the 
Arabs of Iraq had, as elsewhere, been led by the 
declarations of British statesmen to believe that 
they would not only be liberated from the Turkish 
yoke, but allowed to join with the rest of Arabia 
in the creation of a great Arab state under the 
leadership of the ruler of the Hejaz at Mecca, who 
had actually joined the Allies during the Great 
War in open revolt against Turkey, and had 
been recognized accordingly as king of the Hejaz 
with full rights of sovereignty. 

I shall not attempt to plead that these expecta- 
tions were not in a large measure justified, or 
that France and England, the two powers chiefly 
concerned, can be absolved from blame for having 
in the first place rashly raised them and then for 
refusing to fulfil them, or at least postponing their 
fulfilment more or less indefinitely. The always 
dormant fanaticism of a Mohammedan population 


{ 166 | 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


‘combined with the newly awakened sense of 
nationhood to produce in IgIg a serious rising 
in Iraq which required a considerable military 
effort for its repression. The mandate for Iraq 
was not formally conferred upon Great Britain 
till 1922, but from 1920 onward, when military 
administration was superseded by civil, British 
policy was framed in anticipation of the respon- 
sibilities to be ultimately assumed under the 
mandate. The British government set steadily 
before itself the task of facilitating the evolution 
of Iraq toward self-government and even inde- 
pendence. Under an Arab king, Feisal, son of 
the king of Hejaz, Iraq already possesses its 
own national government, responsible to an 
Arab Assembly under a constitution of its own 
making. 

The ultimate recognition of Iraq’s complete 
independence was embodied together with the 
necessary safeguards for special British interests 
and general foreign interests, in a bilateral treaty 
of alliance drafted in the same spirit as that in 
which Lord Milner had in 1920 recommended the 
negotiation of a bilateral treaty between Great 
Britain and Egypt. That treaty under which 
Britain undertakes to support an application from 
the Iraq government to be admitted to the League 


[ 167 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


of Nations has been adopted but only after much 
hesitation by the newly elected assembly at 
Baghdad. There was a very stubborn minority 
composed of extreme Nationalists and of a 
fanatical section of Mohammedans of the Shiah 
persuasion determined to reject any agreed 
settlement. But the majority finally realized 
that but for British support the independence of 
Iraq might be very short-lived, for the Turks will 
in any case be unpleasant neighbors on the north- 
ern frontiers of Iraq, and that frontier is not yet 
finally drawn. 

At Lausanne, Turkey claimed the whole 
province of Mosul though the vast majority of 
the population is Arab and not Turkish, and it 
has always looked down stream, economically 
and politically, toward Baghdad, whereas the 
natural boundary lies well to the north in the 
mountains of Kurdistan. The question of oil, 
of which the district of Mosul is reputed to 
contain large undeveloped supplies, has added a 
new economic factor to the issue, though I believe 
it has never played the decisive part which some 
publicists, more especially on this side of the 
Atlantic, are apt to ascribe to it. 

Agreement having proved impossible at 
Lausanne, the question was reserved for further 


{ 168 } 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


and separate negotiations between Great Britain 
and Turkey, and should they fail, for a final 
reference to the League of Nations. So far 
Turkey has not abated her extravagant demands, 
and England may have to appeal to the League 
of Nations, and put the good faith of the new 
Turkish state to a public test. 

Iraq, moreover, still lacks many of the elements 
of stable government, and has not a tithe of the 
leaven of Western knowledge and experience which 
Egypt, for instance, possesses. The population 
is largely nomadic, and even the townspeople 
were never brought into contact under Turkish 
rule with the better Western influences which had 
long been at work in Egypt, and scarcely at all 
with Western education. The British government 
has declared that within four years from the 
ratification of the treaty by the Iraq Assembly, 
or at an earlier date, should Iraq become a mem- 
ber of the League of Nations, it will withdraw 
the last of the British forces, already very con- 
siderably reduced, and, if so desired, all the 
administrative agencies of British guidance and 
assistance which the Iraq ministers have them- 
selves expressed the desire to retain for the 
present. There are good men in Iraq who have 
shown themselves quick to learn, but they will 


[ 169 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


have to carry the bulk of their fellow-countrymen 
with them during the next four years if Iraq is 
then to stand on her own legs. But if Britain can 
secure a satisfactory settlement of the Mosul 
question with Turkey, she will be in a position 
to claim that in Iraq at least she has done her 
best to discharge her responsibilities as a manda- 
tory power in accordance with the spirit of the 
League of Nations Covenant. 

In Syria and Palestine, which was formerly 
regarded as one with Syria, the Arabs had been 
led to conceive during the war even higher expecta- 
tions of the future than in Iraq. For if a great 
Arab state was to be formed out of the provinces 
released from the Turkish yoke, the Syrian Arabs 
were entitled to hope that they would play a 
leading part init. They were in every way more 
advanced than the Arabs of the Hejaz, of which 
the Allies had already recognized the inde- 
pendence. Many of them had received good 
Western education, especially in two great institu- 
tions at Beirut—the one a large Jesuit university 
which enjoyed the whole-hearted support of 
France, and the other an admirable American 
university conducted, like Robert College at Con- 
stantinople, also American, on the best modern 
lines. 


[ 170 } 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


They possessed commercial and financial enter- 
prise which had been developed in increasing 
intercourse with the West, and a large number of 
Syrians who found employment in Egypt during 
the long period of British control had brought 
home to their people the contrast between 
occidental and Turkish methods of government. 
From all these elements there had grown up a 
vigorous national movement which had been 
sealed with the blood of martyrs in the days of 
the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress 
and still more when Enver and Talaat ruled at 
Constantinople during the Great War. 

These hopes were raised to a high pitch when 
the Turkish armies were driven headlong out of 
Syria, and General Allenby, who commanded 
the British forces, allowed the Arab flag to be 
hoisted at Damascus. But they faded away, 
or were at least relegated to a very distant future, 
at the Paris Peace Conference, when the Allied 
and Associated Powers agreed that, until such 
time as it would be practicable to create a great 
independent Arab state, Syria should come, like 
Iraq, under the mandatory system. An American 
Commission sent out by President Wilson re- 
ported a very widespread desire for an American 
mandate, but no effect could be given to it when 


{ 171 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


the United States rejected the Versailles Treaty 
and the Covenant of the League of Nations. 
The door was at once reopened to Anglo-French 
jealousies reaching far back into history, which 
were only composed by the attribution to Britain 
and France of two separate mandates for Palestine 
and Syria, respectively. 

Again, I do not propose to plead that the 
attribution of those mandates by the League of 
Nations is above criticism. The Covenant of the 
League provides that the wishes of the populations 
concerned should be a principal consideration. 
There is abundant evidence to show that the ma- 
jority of the Syrian population strongly objected 
to a French mandate, and that the majority of the 
Palestinian population did not desire a British 
mandate if the latter was to be used as an im- 
plement of the Zionist policy to which the British 
cabinet had committed itself during the war by the 
Balfour Declaration. That Declaration, I need 
hardly remind you, contained the promise of a 
national homeland for the Jewish people in 
Palestine, and though it was specifically added 
that “‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice 
the civil and religious rights of existing non- 
Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and 
political status enjoyed by Jews in another 


[172] 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


country,’ it involved an experiment whichimported 
into the relations between the Occident and the 
Orient an entirely new element of racial and re- 
ligious discord. For if the Jews are an oriental 
race and their religion has remained an essentially 
oriental religion, those who were most intimately 
associated with the Zionist movement were just 
those who drew their inspiration from the most 
advanced schools of occidental political thought, 
or were ready to flood Palestine with the most 
undesirable class of Jewish immigrants from the 
ghettos of Russian and Polish cities. 

Wealthy Jewish philanthropists have for the 
last thirty or forty years founded and supported 
a certain number of Jewish settlements in which 
Jews rescued from the degradation of those 
surroundings have unexpectedly shown that they 
can be converted into good husbandmen and fruit 
growers. The annual stream of Jewish pilgrims 
who have always poured in from abroad to worship 
at Jerusalem has also its economic value. But the 
prospect of a large Jewish immigration of the type 
contemplated by the leading Zionists was quite 
another thing. The natural resources of the 
country may be greatly expanded in time, but 
at present it cannot support any large addition 
to the population, nor is there room for such an 


{ 173 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


addition unless there are large transfers of land 
from its present possessors to the newcomers. 

The feeling of alarm among the majority of the 
inhabitants of Palestine, both Mohammedan and 
Christian, was all the greater as the most rabid 
Zionists made no secret of their intention to 
construe the Balfour Declaration as entitling 
Jews to a predominant share in the government 
and administration of the country. The British 
high commissioner was himself a Jew, Sir Herbert 
Samuel, but fortunately a man of high character 
as well as ability, who just because he was a Jew 
was perhaps more successful than any Christian 
might have been in keeping the more ardent 
Zionists within bounds. But the task assigned 
to him seems to be as difficult as the squaring 
of the circle, for to reconcile the second clause of 
the Balfour Declaration with the first seems to 
me almost to defy the wit of man. At any rate, 
the Mohammedans, who form over three-quarters 
of the population, have for the time being com- 
posed their ancient differences with the tithe of 
the population that is Christian in order to show 
a solid front to the other tithe who are Jews. 
Occasional affrays bear witness to the bitterness 
of anti-Jewish feeling, although the small British 
force maintained in the country has usually proved 


1 174 ] 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


ample to maintain law and order, and Moham- 
medans and Christians have so far persisted in 
refusing to have lot or part in the proposed 
Legislative Council on which they were offered 
what they regarded as insufficient representation. 
The Jewish population have alone so far perfected 
their internal organization. 

But Zionism has still to show whether it has 
sufficient vitality to make good. Many of the 
Jewish immigrants have already lost heart, and 
the number of those who were brought in during 
the last year is barely superior to that of those 
who left the country in disgust. Among the 
leading Jews in Europe and especially in England 
there are many who have refused from the begin- 
ning to have any faith in Zionism, and even in 
America, where it has found its warmest supporters, 
the stream of financial assistance upon which the 
Jewish immigrants must for a great many years 
be largely dependent, is reported to have percepti- 
bly slackened. Meanwhile, Palestine can hardly 
be said to have offered a happy field for the 
mandatory system. | 

Nor can Syria. Only the Maronites, an old 
Christian community in the Lebanon, who had 
always been special protégés of France, were 
prepared to welcome a French mandate, and the 


{175 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Mohammedans were distinctly hostile to it. A 
congress of Syrian notables tried to force a con- 
clusion on March 10, 1920, by offering the crown 
of Syria, including Palestine, to Emir Feisal, son 
of the king of the Hejaz, who accepted it with 
the title of “king.” France regarded him as too 
closely identified with British interests, and 
Britain, besides having no wish to quarrel with 
France over Syria, considered herself bound to 
see that Palestine was set apart for the Zionist 
experiment. Feisal was therefore summoned to 
attend the San Remo Conference, and, when 
he failed to attend, it was decided to assign 
mandates for Palestine as well as Iraq to Great 
Britain, and for Syria (without Palestine) to 
France. 

A French army, taking the place of the British 
forces withdrawn after the war, was already in 
occupation of Syria, and after overcoming some 
resistance from Feisal’s troops, entered Damascus 
and deposed the Emir and ordered him to leave 
the country. As we have seen, he shortly found 
another crown in Iraq, and the French began to 
rule Syria as a mandated territory, but with a 
heavier hand than was ever contemplated by the 
authors of the Covenant, even before the attribu- 
tion of the mandates for the provinces detached 


[ 176 } 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


from the former Ottoman Empire was formally 
approved by the Council of the League of Nations. 
Since then things have somewhat improved. 
The Christian Lebanon and the Druse country 
of the Hauran have been granted their own 
autonomy, and the three other provinces of Syria 
have been federated. But beneath the surface 
there is still much popular discontent. 

It cannot, therefore, be contended that the 
mandatory system in Syria or in Palestine has 
fulfilled all the expectations raised in the Covenant 
of the League of Nations, or even wholly conformed 
to its provisions. The Arab dream of a great 
and independent Arab state is still far from fulfil- 
ment. In theory the independence of each of the 
mandated states has been recognized, but only in 
Iraq does it depend upon the people themselves 
whether or not it shall become a reality in the 
near future. The Hejaz, under King Hussein, is 
indeed already an independent Arab kingdom, as 
that was part of the bargain definitely struck with 
Great Britain when he decided to throw in his 
lot with the Allies in 1916. But his methods of 
government and administration have not proved 
such as to encourage confidence in the fitness of 
the Arab tribesmen of the desert to govern 
themselves on modern lines. 


{177 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


The fact is that the end of the war left the 

Allies face to face all over the Arab provinces 
with a number of conflicting commitments into 
which they had from time to time entered rather 
recklessly in order to meet the exigencies of a 
dificult and fluctuating war situation. Had 
America been willing to burden herself with a 
mandate for the whole or part of the Arab 
countries, the problem would have been simplified, 
for the United States had never been mixed up 
in the political rivalries which complicated the 
settlement, and the Arab peoples might have 
been more easily induced to rely upon her impar- 
tiality and good faith. But that was not to be, 
and the mandatory system, however imperfectly 
it has operated, is probably the only one by which 
international conflicts could be avoided while 
reserving for the Arabs the possibility at least of 
working out their own salvation in a more or 
less remote future. 

The principle underlying the mandatory system 
undoubtedly represents a progressive stage in 
the evolution of the law of nations. For the first 
time at the end of a great war in which enemy 
territories had been conquered, the conquerors 
agreed not only to forego the right of sovereignty 
which they would formerly have claimed over 


{ 178 ] 


PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES 


them almost as a matter of course, but to assume 
for them the responsibilities of trusteeship under 
the supervision of an independent authority. 
They have to discharge those responsibilities at 
their own cost and without any definite benefit 
for themselves. Under the Covenant there seems 
even to be no provision enabling them to lay 
down a mandate if they find the burden imposed 
upon them excessive. They have to send in an 
annual report as trustees to the League of Nations, 
which ‘is the final authority to pass judgment on 
the discharge of their trusteeship. How far in 
the case of the mandated Arab territories the 
mandatory system will supply a workable nexus 
between the Occident and the Orient it is yet 
too early to say, but as laid down in the Covenant 
of the League it certainly constitutes a praise- 
worthy attempt to readjust them in a new and 
not ungenerous spirit. 


{179 ] 





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VI 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM AND 
SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 


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VI 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM AND 
SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 


Before placing a few general conclusions before 
you I must invite your attention to the new and 
demoralizing factor which bolshevism has intro- 
duced into the relations between the Occident 
and the Orient. Bolshevism itself is neither of | 
the Occident nor of the Orient, for while it seeks 
to undermine the foundations of our Western 
civilization, it has no affinity with any of those 
types of oriental civilization upon whose antago- 
nism to the West I have dwelt in some of my 
preceding lectures. It has so far merely been a 
destructive force, and in Europe it has triumphed 
only in Russia. But Russia herself may be said 
to have always stood psychologically and geo- 
graphically midway between the Occident and the 
Orient and to have been, beneath her thinly cul- 
tured surface, quite as much Asian as European, 
and as until the overthrow of the old autocracy 
she ruled over a large part of the Asiatic continent, 
she has become as formidable a base for bolshevist 


{ 183 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


propaganda in Asia as she ever was for the terri- 
torial expansion of the czarist empire. 

None of the countries of the Orient bordering 
on Russia has entirely escaped bolshevist penetra- 
tion. When Turkey suddenly resumed her 
struggle against the Allies while Western Europe 
was still countenancing the efforts of the Russian 
“Whites” to wrest their country from the “Reds,” 
Angora and Moscow were drawn together by their 
common enmity to the Western powers. What- 
ever the fundamental antagonism between the 
Mohammedan conception of a strong theocratic 
state, rooted in the principle of authority, spiritual 
as well as temporal, and the bolshevist combination 
of atheism and anarchism, the two chief figures 
of Moscow and Angora, Lenin and Mustapha 
Kemal, were to this extent at one, that they both 
looked upon the Occident as the enemy, and were 
both equally implacable in their determination 
to crush what was called in Russia the “anti- 
revolutionary” and in Turkey the “anti-national” 
forces. 

I will not labor the analogy between the war 
waged by the new Turkish state against the ancient 
institutions of Islam and the bolshevist persecu- 
tion of the Russian Church, or between the 
ruthless dictatorship of Lenin and that to which 


{ 184 ] 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


Mustapha Kemal seems to have attained at 
Angora. So long as a state of war existed between 
Turkey and the Western powers it was easy for 
Moscow and Angora to parade their friendship 
in solemn treaties of amity and alliance. But 
they both have separate ambitions which tend 
to drive them asunder. Nationalism, often of the 
most extravagant type has been the great driving 
force in modern Turkey ever since the Revolution 
of 1908, and soviet Russia has herself been rapidly 
reverting to the czarist policy of expansion in 
Asia, and not least in those regions which have 
long been a battleground between Russia and 
Turkey, or must eventually become so, if the 
Pan-Turanian dreams of Turkish nationalists are 
ever to be fulfilled. 

At the outset soviet Russia emphatically 
renounced before the whole world all the old 
inheritance of czarist aggrandizement, and 
promised to all the peoples of Asia, including 
those who had been formerly subjects of Russia, 
complete freedom to constitute themselves into 
new and independent states in pursuance of the 
fundamental doctrine of self-determination, which 
bolshevism could alone be trusted to carry into 
practice. Such counsels of perfection, even if 
they were ever sincere, did not last very long, and 


{ 185 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Moscow soon decided that  self-determination 
must in any case be conditioned on the acceptance 
of the revolutionary doctrines of bolshevism. 
Today a half-dozen states on the Caucasian 
borderland between Turkey and Russia, mostly 
conquered in former times by Russia from Turkey, 
have been successfully sovietized and affiliated so 
closely with the Russian soviet that they are 
actually as completely under Russian domination 
as in the days of imperial Russia. But as we are 
told to give even the devil his due, it is, one must 
admit, in one of the sovietized republics of Trans- 
caucasus that the name of Armenia, expunged 
from the Treaty of Lausanne, alone survives 
today. 

All this has naturally caused considerable 
perturbation at Angora, for a barrier has thus 
been set up against the expansion of the Turkish 
Republic in one direction toward which her own 
militant nationalism was driving her. Already 
at Lausanne there was a slight rift within the 
lute. The representatives of Moscow and of 
Angora did not at all see eye to eye on the question 
of the Straits and the Black Sea, and though in 
this case it was Moscow that had to yield, its 
last word has assuredly not yet been said. For 
there is little to distinguish the militarism and 


{ 186 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


imperialism of soviet Russia of today from the 
cezarist Russia of yesterday. 

Bolshevist propaganda among the Young Turks 
probably achieved its greatest measure of success 
at a great Oriental Congress held in Baku on the 
Caspian in September, 1920, which was attended 
by a large Turkish delegation as well as by 
delegates from soviet Russia, from the Caucasian 
states, from the north of Persia, and from Central 
Asia. Many different languages were spoken at 
this Congress, and the only words which every dele- 
gate understood and the vast majority applauded 
were “‘soviet”’ and “bolshevik.” Coming events 
seem on that occasion to have cast their shadows 
before, when Comrade Zinovieff, while congratulat- 
ing Mustapha Kemal on his splendid fight against 
capitalistic Europe, deplored the fact that his 
government was not yet a communist government. 
Addressing himself to the Turkish delegates, he 
warned them not tobolster up the sultan’s authority 
when the last hour had struck for all authority 
everywhere, and he exhorted them on the contrary 
to teach their people to shake off all faith in the 
sultan in the same way as the Russian people 
had shaken off all faith in the czar. Zinovieff, 
today still one of the inner ring at Moscow, 
boldly singled out for reprobation the language 


{ 187 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


then quite recently held by Mustapha Kemal 
himself at Angora where he had declared that 
nothing would ever be done by him to impair 
the sacred dignity of the sultan and khalif which 
was above and beyond discussion. Comrade 
Zinovieff may well have congratulated himself that 
this warning had not fallen on deaf ears when not 
so very long afterward Mustapha Kemal himself 
destroyed both the sultanate and the khalifate. 

In Persia conditions have been less favorable 
to the spread of bolshevism. Anti-European 
feeling may be only a degree less deep than in 
Turkey. Sunk into almost hopeless decay under 
corrupt and feeble rulers, the ancient kingdom 
of Persia owed even more than the Ottoman 
Empire its preservation in the nineteenth century 
to the political rivalry of Britain and Russia, 
fearful and distrustful of each other in the Middle 
Fast as in the Near East. In the presence of the 
growing German peril they finally composed 
in 1907 their differences in Asia just as France and 
Great Britain had for the same reason composed 
their colonial differences in 1904. But they com- 
posed them chiefly at the cost of such little in- 
dependence as Persia still possessed. 

The Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 con- 
verted northern Persia into a large Russian zone 


{ 188 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


of influence, and a smaller British zone was 
created in southeastern Persia, with a sort of 
neutral “‘no man’s land” between the two in 
central Persia. Even so backward a people as 
the Persians could not but resent being dealt 
with in this offhand way as mere objects of 
barter. There were some among them, too, who 
had come into contact with Western ideas of 
freedom and had acquired some knowledge. of 
the working of nationalist and even revolutionary 
movements in Europe. The Persian nationalists 
wrestled in the first place with the shah and wrung 
from him the grant of a rudimentary parliament 
at Teheran. But these concessions were as 
distasteful to the autocratic traditions which he 
had inherited from his ancestors as to his Russian 
protectors. 

Many Americans must be familiar with the 
rather pathetic story of the fruitless struggle 
which the immature Persian reformers tried to 
wage against the combined influence of Russia 
and of the reactionary elements in their own 
country, while Great Britain was constrained by 
considerations of European policy to look on 
reluctantly and rather shamefacedly. For the 
Persians, relying upon the disinterested impar- 
tiality of America, had called in an American, 


[ 189 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Shuster, to act as their financial adviser, and when 
he retired, disgusted with the political situation in 
Teheran which constantly defeated his attempts 
to clean up the Augean stables of Persian finance, 
he wrote a vigorous account of his mission which 
created considerable sensation at the time. He 
was perhaps not always quite fair to Russia or 
to England, but in the main the situation which 
he showed up. was one that did no credit to either 
power, though, on the other hand he was perhaps 
inclined to deal rather too leniently with the 
shortcomings of his Persian nationalist friends. 
When the Great War broke out, the sympathies 
of the Persian people were on the whole not with 
the Western powers in whom they chiefly saw 
the allies of Russia. After Turkey’s entry into 
the war Persia found herself made a theater of 
subsidiary military operations conducted upon 
her territory with little or no regard for her 
declared neutrality which she was herself powerless 
to uphold. Turkish troops invaded her western 
provinces and German and Austrian agents, some 
of them consuls, merchants, and even professors, 
who had been preparing the ground beforehand 
during long residence in Persia, poured into the 
country to raise bands of Persian mercenaries 
whose activities were chiefly directed toward 


[ 190 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


the southern provinces in which British influence 
predominated. Von der Goltz himself came 
across from Turkey with a large German and 
Turkish staff to settle a great plan of campaign. 
One large band under German leadership actually 
penetrated into Persian Baluchistan which marches 
with the extreme western frontiers of British 
India. The British organized counter-movements 
from India with a stiffening of Indian troops and 
finally cleared the nondescript hostile forces out 
of southern Persia. 

Meanwhile, a Russian army, moving down from 
the north, had not only overawed the capital 
when the shah had been at one moment on the 
point of joining the German and Austrian ministers 
and throwing in his lot with the Germanic powers, 
but it had driven the Turks out of western Persia 
and nearly joined hands with the British forces 
in Mesopotamia. But the Russian forces melted 
away there as on every other front under the 
redhot breath of bolshevism. 

When the Great War was over and Russia 
had for the time being ceased to count, British 
influence seemed for a time to be absolutely 
supreme at Teheran, and the Persian government 
readily subscribed to a new treaty with Britain 
which practically placed the whole task of Persian 


{ 191 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


reconstruction in British hands. Lord Curzon, 
who was the author of that treaty, had once more 
underrated the latent strength of Persian national 
feeling and also the rapid penetration of Russian 
bolshevism from the Caucasus into northern 
Persia and even into the capital, after the with- 
drawal of the British forces that had at one time 
reached the Caspian Sea. Even before the war 
the Persian and Tatar elements in the Russian 
Caucasus had played a conspicuous part in the 
Persian nationalist movement, and after the war 
they generally sided with the bolshevists in the 
three-cornered hostilities between British and 
Turkish and Russian bolshevist forces in the 
Caucasus and on the Caspian littoral, where 
soviet republics have since then been constituted. 

How strong a hold on Persia bolshevism had 
already got in 1920 may be gathered from the 
fact that next to the Turkish delegation the 
Persian delegation was numerically the strongest 
at the Mohammedan Bolshevist Congress at 
Baku to which I have already referred. Lord 
Curzon’s treaty was used as a valuable weapon 
for purposes of bolshevist propaganda, and, as 
British ministers had never dreamed of imposing 
it by force on Persia, they ended in wisely allowing 
it to lapse altogether. The bolshevists, however, 


[ 192 ] 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


naturally boasted that it was they who had killed 
it, and a Russian soviet ambassador strutted for 
a time through the streets of the Persian capital 
as if it belonged to him. 

But the rulers of Persia soon began to dread 
soviet Russia as much as they had formerly 
dreaded imperial Russia, and in Persia, which is 
the only Shiah Mohammedan state in the Orient, 
there is a powerful class which does not exist 
in Sunni Mohammedan countries. Among the 
Shiahs alone there is something closely resembling 
an organizedpriestly hierarchy. Extremely bigoted 
and reactionary, the Persian priests, or Mujtahid, 
soon took fright when they understood what 
Russian bolshevism stands for. 

Scarcely less frightened, though chiefly for 
their own loaves and fishes, were the parasitic 
classes from which the corrupt Persian officialdom 
in the capital and in the provinces is chiefly 
recruited. The shah himself, as worthless as 
most of his predecessors, sought refuge from the 
cares of state in chronic journeys to Europe which 
merely increase the penury of the treasury. 
But American advisers have been again called in 
and have already done some good work, though 
hampered by many obstructive forces as well as 
by frequent changes in the Persian ministry. 


[ 193 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Only within the last year or so has a figure 
emerged from the welter of political intrigue in 
Teheran who promises to give somewhat greater 
stability to the feeble structure of government. 
Riza Khan has some features in common with 
the Turkish dictator. His origin is obscure and 
his antecedents are not altogether commendable, 
but he appears to have the same ruthless deter- 
mination, and, for a Persian, very remarkable 
powers of organization. He has for the first time 
in our days created a Persian army capable at 
least of maintaining order at home, and he 1s by 
all accounts the strongest prime minister that 
modern Persia has ever had. Like Mustapha 
Kemal, he appeals to the nationalism of his people, 
and three months ago he was believed to be on the 
point of following the Turkish dictator’s example 
by deposing the shah and proclaiming a Persian 
republic. There, however, he found himself 
confronted with the intense conservatism of the 
Persian priesthood, who countered him with a 
solemn declaration that a republic was incom- 
patible with the fundamental principles of the 
Mohammedan religion. Riza Khan was wise 
enough to give way for the time being and an 
official assurance was issued that there would be 
no republic. The dictator went through the form 


{ 194 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


of resignation but the short-lived crisis ended 
with his resumption of the premiership. Whatever 
his ambitions may be, these are not likely ever 
to favor bolshevism, though it still carries on an 
active propaganda through its own organs in 
the Persian press, and the latest accounts point 
to a recrudescence of Republican agitation, di- 
rected now not only against the shah who still 
tarries in Europe, but even against the dictator 
himself. 

Whatever may be the case in Persia, it 1s 
difficult to believe that Afghanistan provides a 
congenial soil for bolshevism. Like its Persian 
neighbor with whom in former times it was 
constantly in conflict, Afghanistan has figured | 
chiefly in modern history as a buffer state between 
the Russian and the British empires in Asia, and 
three times during the nineteenth century the 
British went to war with Afghanistan in order 
to check the growth of Russian influence at 
Kabul, the capital. They were costly wars, and 
the first one had a disastrous epilogue when in 
1842, after having successfully occupied Kabul, 
the small British Indian force was almost com- 
pletely annihilated before it could get back to 
India. Two other British expeditions in 1878-80 
ended after costly vicissitudes in establishing on 


{ 195 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


the throne of Kabul a ruler, Abdul Rahman 
Khan, who was shrewd enough to realize the value 
of a powerful neighbor’s protection and was 
satisfied to leave the control of his foreign relations 
in the hands of the government of India in return 
for a handsome subsidy and full rights of sant 
within his dominions. 

On this basis things proceeded fairly none 
until the Afghans were led to believe that the old 
Russian menace had disappeared with the Russian 
Revolution, and that they could even count on 
the support of their new bolshevist friends if 
they broke with India. In March, 1919, a new 
ameer, Amanulla Khan, announced his accession 
with all the customary protestations of friendship to 
Britain and India. But the disorders with which 
the British were just then suddenly and almost 
simultaneously confronted in Northern India, in 
Mesopotamia, and in Egypt, and of which the 
gravity was enormously magnified by bolshevist 
propaganda, encouraged him to change his tune 
abruptly, and only a month later he proclaimed 
a holy war, and boastfully summoned his tribes to 
follow him as they had more than once followed his 
ancestors to the facile conquest of the fat plains of 
India. The Afghan forces were promptly repulsed, 
and before the end of May the ameer was asking 


{ 196 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


for peace, which was formally concluded early in 
August. 

But though defeated in the field, the Afghan 
ruler achieved what had probably been his own 
chief purpose. The comforting word “‘self-deter- 
mination” had reached even to Kabul, and he 
construed it to his own satisfaction as covering his 
claim to recognition as an absolutely independent 
sovereign. This satisfaction the government of 
India was quite ready to concede to him as, with 
the disappearance of imperial Russia, it saw no 
further need to subsidize Afghanistan as a buffer 
state or to assume any of the responsibilities 
implied in the control of its foreign relations, 
which might have led to awkward entanglements 
with bolshevist Russia pulling the strings at 
Kabul. The complete independence of Afghan- 
istan was recognized, and though the first use 
made of his independence by the ameer, or 
“king,” as he was now styled, was to sign a treaty 
of amity and alliance with soviet Russia, he 
redressed the balance by welcoming a British 
mission to Kabul and accrediting an Afghan 
representative in London. 

The king has an uneasy time with the rather 
loose agglomeration of unruly tribes that make up 
Afghanistan, and his genuine desire to introduce 


[ 197 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


certain rudimentary reforms into his administra- 
tion together with increased taxation has already 
landed him in serious trouble with them. The 
influence exercised on public affairs by his wife, 
who is a very “advanced” lady, 1s in itself a stone 
of offense in a Mohammedan country in which 
women have hitherto been kept in rigid subjection. 
There is frequent friction, too, between the few 
Europeans whom he has taken into his service 
as he has imported them mostly from Germany 
and from France in order to prevent any one 
group acquiring exclusive influence. Though he 
coquetted with soviet Russia so long as he was less 
afraid of her than of British power in India, he is 
much too autocratic a ruler to have any real 
sympathy with bolshevism, and in the havoc which 
bolshevism has wrought in Central Asia he has 
had too many unpleasant object lessons at his 
very door. 

Bolshevism has poured forth over the whole of 
Central Asia like a devastating flood. I have had 
occasion to allude more than once to Russian 
expansion in Asia in the old days of the czars 
and its effects upon British policy toward Turkey. 
Not only had imperial Russia possessed herself 
of the whole of Siberia and Northern Asia right 
away to the Pacific, but she had steadily absorbed 


[ 198 ] 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


or brought under her overlordship all the Moham- 
medan states of Central Asia down to the land 
frontiers of British India as well as along the 
borderlands of Afghanistan and Persia. The 
Russians maintained order and did a great deal 
for the material development of the country 
which they linked up by two separate railways 
with the Caspian as well as with their great 
Siberian trunk line. In all the chief cities there 
were large Russian garrisons and in some of them 
considerable Russian settlements, in which there 
was generally a nucleus of political exiles banished 
from European Russia. The Russian Revolution 
shook the whole fabric of Russian domination. 
The people of Central Asia, all Mohammedans, 
saw in it an opportunity to shake off an alien 
and infidel yoke, and soviet Russia encouraged 
them at first to believe that she would not block 
their way to freedom. 

One of Lenin’s earliest measures was to issue a 
decree proclaiming for all peoples, and not least for 
all oriental peoples, the right of self-determination. 
But when Moscow proceeded to organize its vast 
system of bolshevist propaganda, it was nowhere 
more active than in Central Asia. In 1920 a 
Communist University of Workers in the East 
was founded in Moscow under the direction of 


{ 199 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Comrade Broyodo, who had formerly been a 
lawyer at Tashkend, and branches were soon 
opened at Tashkend, Baku, and Irkutsk. That 
of Tashkend, the former seat of Russian govern- 
ment in Central Asia, soon had over 300 students, 
and there was a special school for women. 

Education was based exclusively on communist 
principles, and translations from the works of 
Lenin, Kautsky, and Stalin as well as Karl Marx 
were made into the chief Central Asian vernaculars 
for the use of students and for general distribution. 
Some of the older Russian Orientalists were 
commandeered to form a new scientific association 
on bolshevist lines as one of the sections of the 
Commissariat of Nationalities under whose control 
were placed a number of subsidized institutions 
created for or readapted to bolshevist propaganda. 
The remnants of the old Russian garrisons and 
bureaucracy in Central Asia were at the same time 
impressed into the service of bolshevism. A 
number of vernacular newspapers were started 
to preach bolshevist doctrine and even the theaters 
and cinemas were mobilized. At the bolshevist 
schools, which sprang up like mushrooms, Moham- 
medan boys were taught to look henceforth to 
Moscow as the Mecca and Medina from which 
salvation would come to Islam. 


{ 200 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


As in the Caucasus, the various nationalities 
of Central Asia were encouraged to constitute 
themselves into soviet republics, e.g., the soviet 
republic of Khorezm, once the khanate of Khiva; 
the soviet republic of Turkestan, with Tashkend 
as its capital; the soviet republic of Bokhara, 
also formerly a khanate. Moscow allowed them 
for a time to enjoy the illusion of independence, 
but very soon soviet Russia reverted to the old 
traditions of czarist Russia, which it had originally 
repudiated as incompatible with its mission of 
world-liberation. The old Russian agencies as 
well as the political exiles were employed to preach 
close affiliation with the Russian union of soviet 
republics. They were speedily reinforced by 
commissars from Moscow, accompanied or followed 
by Red armies and sooner or later treaties, 
so-called, of alliance, imposed upon the new 
sovietized republics, brought them once more 
under the domination of soviet Russia which was 
no less effective and far more tyrannical than that 
of czarist Russia had ever been. Risings followed 
which were ruthlessly crushed, and devastating 
famines and wholesale ruin. 

We need go no farther for evidence than to the 
official organs of the Moscow government. The 
Izvestia itself once described at great length and 


[ 201 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


with quite unaccustomed frankness the endless pro- 
cession of carts with half-naked and more than 
half-starved people streaming across the Kirghiz 
steppes to Orenburg. The mortality among chil- 
dren reached 80 per cent. The living, it said, 
were killed; the dead were ‘dug up for human 
food. Khiva was pillaged in turn by Turkoman 
tribes and by Red troops. In the soviet republic 
of Tashkend, Kokhand, “the charming,” a city 
of over 80,000 inhabitants which had become 
under czarist rule the flourishing center of the 
great cotton-growing area of Ferghana, was 
taken, pillaged, and burned by the Reds, and 
10,000 Mohammedans were massacred, not of 
course as Mohammedans but as counter-revolu- 
tionaries. 

Repeated and sanguinary rebellions and repres- 
sions ravaged the large state of Bokhara, and the 
ameer, whom czarist Russia had always recognized 
as a semi-independent feudatory, had to take 
refuge in Afghanistan. Before death carried him 
off, the famous Enver Pasha flitted across the 
blood-stained stage, first as an ally of the bolshev- 
ists and then as the leader of a Mohammedan 
revolt against them. The history of Central Asia 
during the last five years is a confused and still 
largely obscured record of destruction and anarchy, 


{ 202 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


with bolshevism, however, still triumphantly rid- 
ing the whirlwind. 

In oriental countries farther removed from 
Russia, such as India, bolshevism makes its way 
underground to the congested urban slums into 
which the growth of modern industrialism has 
too often packed its unskilled workers, only 
half-weaned by the attraction of higher wages 
from their former village life, almost wholly illiter- 
ate and densely ignorant, unorganized, and, until 
recent legislation for the protection of labor, largely 
at the mercy of an equally new and irresponsible 
class of Indian employers, slow to acquire the 
sense of duty to their men which British employers 
for the most part bring with them to India. 

Gandhi may denounce industrialism and com- 
mercialism as among the most Satanic gifts of the 
Occident. But they have come to India to stay. 
Indian industry and Indian trade received a 
tremendous impetus during the war when the 
great natural resources of the country were for 
the first time systematically explored and devel- 
oped for purposes of war production. Indians 
are now coming to the front at the head of 
great commercial and industrial enterprises who 
are in many ways qualified to compete with the 
best Europeans. The Tatars, for instance, have 


| 203 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


created at Jamshidpur in Bengal, round their 
splendidly equipped iron and steel works, an 
industrial city which will bear comparison with 
anything we can show in England. Fiscal freedom 
has been granted to India under her new constitu- 
tional charter, and many Swarajists who profess 
to be in other respects devoted followers of Gandhi 
have parted company with him on this point. 
They have placed the protection of Indian indus- 
tries and trade in the forefront of their program, 
and, although they still call themselves non- 
co-operators, they have found themselves during 
the last legislative session at Delhi voting in the 
same lobby as the government in support of tariff 
measures which they attacked only as falling 
short of the high tariff wall they would like to 
build up against foreign and especially, of course, 
against British competing imports. 

Indian labor, in the meantime, has yet to be 
organized on efficient lines, and, as it has so far 
produced no leaders of its own, the trade unions — 
which are springing up like mushrooms are mainly 
in the hands of professional agitators who might 
almost have themselves graduated at Moscow. 
For Moscow boasts of the special attention devoted 
in its various oriental colleges to the training 
of bolshevist ‘‘missionaries” with the requisite 


{ 204 ] 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


knowledge to arouse as its organ the Novy Vostok, 
or New East, puts it: “the whole colonial world 
of the oppressed not only in Asia but in Africa 
and America against the capitalistic society of 
Europe and the United States.” 

The Orient and the Occident are being drawn 
together by all the mechanical appliances of 
Western civilization. Telegraphs and wireless, 
fast steamers, railways, and motor roads are 
annihilating distance and time. Outwardly the 
chief cities of the Orient have adopted or are 
adopting most of the material equipment of 
European cities. In many directions intellectual 
intercourse between the Occident and the Orient 
is increasing every day. In almost every oriental 
country there has grown up a Western-educated 
class that can speak and read and write, sometimes 
quite admirably, one or other of our Western 
languages, more especially English. There are 
judges and lawyers, doctors and engineers, men 
of letters and men of science, capable of competing 
in their own field with the men of the Occident 
who have been their teachers. The textbooks 
in schools and colleges are for the most part 
borrowed from the Occident, and it is to occidental 
research that the Orient owes even its much larger 
knowledge today of its own past history. 


{ 205 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Many Orientals have been brought up almost 
exclusively on occidental literature of which at 
first at any rate they preferred the best. Today 
unfortunately the popular bookstalls of the 
Orient are littered with its worst, often in vernacu- 
lar translations, just as cinemas generally parade 
the worst possible pictures of occidental life. 
The influence of the press, itself an entirely 
modern production imported from the Occident, 
has become ubiquitous. In India many of the 
leading newspapers, owned and edited by Indians, 
are written and published in English, though the 
reverse of English in spirit and tone, and give the 
cue to innumerable vernacular newspapers far 
more crude and violent. Under the stimulus of 
the Occident, the Orient is learning to develop 
its immense resources, and the markets of the 
Orient, more and more closely linked up in trade 
and industry and finance with those of the 
Occident, respond automatically to every wave 
of prosperity and depression that beats upon them 
from London or Paris or New York 

Western education has been for the Orient 
the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Whether 
the good shall prevail over the evil constitutes 
the supreme test to which the civilization of the 
Occident as a whole—the civilization that is as 


[ 206 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


much that of America as of Europe—is being 
subjected today throughout the Orient. It is 
not merely or mainly the political ascendancy of 
any one European power over these or those 
peoples of the Orient that 1s at stake. It is not 
merely or mainly whether President Wilson’s 
formula of “‘self-determination”’ is, or was intended 
to be, applicable to the nations of the Orient whose 
independence might very well mean merely a 
reversion to oriental forms of society and govern- 
ment entirely incompatible with any fruitful 
relations with the Occident. The fundamental 
issue is whether the Orient can be brought to adapt 
itself to that democratic type of human society 
which the most progressive nations of the Occident 
have gradually evolved as affording the largest 
opportunities for individual and collective freedom 
combined with the restraining sense of individual 
and collective responsibility. 

If one seeks to define what the Orient chiefly 
lacks, and has always lacked, it is the practice of 
freedom with the sense of responsibility, or, in 
one word, character. Almost the only forms of 
government it has ever known have been theocracy 
and autocracy with alternating periods of license 
and anarchy. Nothing can be more undemocratic 
than the Hindu caste system which still holds a 


| 207 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


great part of India in its grip,and Mohammedanism 
has never risen beyond the conception of brother- 
hood in the faith within the Mohammedan world— 
a brotherhood that has constantly broken down 
in practice—and of the whole non-Mohammedan 
world as an irreconcilable world of war. It is, 
nevertheless, among Hindus that some of the 
finest intellects have been drawn into closer 
spiritual communion with the Occident than in 
any other part of the Orient—perhaps because | 
Mohammedanism is not the dominating factor in 
India—and there are no dogmatic limitations to the 
elasticity and eclecticism of Hindu philosophies. 
But nowhere, on the other hand, is the repudia- 
tion of all spiritual communion with the Occident 
louder and more emphatic than it is today in 
India. 

Turkey speaks with another voice, for she has 
never believed in anything but the sword. Allshe 
has borrowed from the Occident is a fierce and nar- 
row nationalism, so narrow that it would seem to be 
a reversion to the primitive tribalism of the Cen- 
tral Asian hordes that were her forebears. In the 
new Turkish state we have seen this fanatically 
Turkish nationalism carried to such lengths that 
it has not only savagely rid its soil of all 
alien races at the imminent risk of economic 


{ 208 }} 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


suicide, but it has even cut itself adrift’ from the 
brotherhood of Islam in order to dig itself in 
the more securely against all contact with the 
non-Turkish Orient as well as with the Occi- 
dent. 

The Arabs have at least once in the course of 
history evolved a civilization which found some 
points of genuine contact with the Occident, and 
rose, though only for a short time, superior to the 
rigid dogmatism of their Mohammedan creed. 
Are they capable of doing so again should they 
recover with the now vacant khalifate the leader- 
ship of Islam which they wielded for many cen- 
turies before the Turks wrested it from them? 
Or will Islam continue to be what it has gradually 
come to be among almost all Arabs—an element 
of passive rather than of active resistance to the 
Occident ? 

In Asia and in Africa all the ancient lands of 
the Arab khalifate have passed within the last 
century under the political control of Western 
powers, whether by annexation, as in Algeria 
and Tripoli, or under foreign protectorates, as in 
Morocco and Tunis, or under the mandatory 
system as in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. Egypt 
alone has secured a formal recognition of her 
independence, but British troops still continue 


{ 209 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


to garrison her two chief cities. In most of these 
Arab lands the tutelage of Western nations is 
now undoubtedly deeply and sometimes fiercely 
resented, but not so much because its benefits 
during an admittedly transitional period are 
denied as because with their growing sense of 
nationhood, which they owe to the Occident, they 
claim to have learned enough to dispense with 
its leading strings. But even among the Arabs 
there is beneath the surface a much deeper and 
more passionate resentment which explodes from 
time to time with elemental energy. 

All the manifold discontents of the Orient are 
bound up together in the clash of color. This is 
nothing new. Nature herself is responsible for it, 
since she gave a generally white complexion to 
all the peoples of the Occident and, in varying 
degrees, a darker complexion to all those of the 
Orient. But it has acquired a dangerous signifi- 
cance with the white man’s assumption of superior 
and indefeasible rights based on the superiority 
of his race. He may couple the exercise of those 
rights with a fine sense of duty toward the colored 
races which he regards as his inferiors, as Kipling 
implied when he wrote of the “white man’s 
burden.” But, rightly or wrongly, the Oriental, 
who for a time admitted and acquiesced with 


{ 210 } 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


almost fatalistic resignation, in the white man’s 
superiority, denies it today—denies it sometimes 
passionately—for all his atavistic instincts, react- 
ing against the aggressive impact of occidental 
civilization, rebel as never before against it; 
sometimes contemptuously because increasing 
intercourse has made him too familiar with the 
seamy side of our civilization; sometimes though 
alas! more rarely because he has assimilated enough 
of its finer spirit to claim the rights of equal 
partnership in all that is best of it. 

So long as personal intercourse between the 
Occident and the Orient was confined within very 
narrow limits, the white man laid much less stress 
than he does today on mere racial superiority. 
To India, for instance, England has sent out on the 
whole her best. Social intercourse between people 
of different races with different beliefs and differ- 
ent customs and different domestic institutions 
was always difficult, but it has become far more 
difficult now that increased facilities of communica- 
tion and the introduction of modern scientific 
appliances and industrial trading methods have 
led to the employment in subordinate capacities 
of a type of Europeans formerly almost unknown 
to the Orient, but now very much in evidence, 
with plenty of good qualities, but more prone than 


{ 211 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


those of better breeding and education to boast 
of their racial superiority and to impress their 
sense of it somewhat roughly upon the Indians 
or other Orientals with whom they rub shoulders. 
It cannot be denied that racial hatred has often 
had its origin in the rancor created by personal 
insults to which the natives of oriental countries 
even of good position have occasionally been 
subjected by white men who fancied themselves, 
but were not, their betters. Industrial competi- 
tion, at the same time, has intensified so rapidly 
all the world over that the Occident has been 
seized with a great fear lest it should be swamped 
by the cheaper labor and lower standards of 
life of the countless millions of the Orient which 
it has itself equipped to become its competi- 
tors. 

I have touched only on that part of the Orient 
which has been for many centuries interlocked 
in history with the Occident, but the same line 
of racial cleavage is deepening even in those 
countries of the farther Orient—China and Japan— 
which I have excluded from my purview, because, 
having their own great civilizations, they lived 
their own lives, almost within the memory of 
living man in almost complete isolation from the 
Occident, until Europe and America, too, went 


{ 212 | 


THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM 


and thundered at their gates. Today the racial 
issue is raised all over the world. 

In this country you have the color problem in 
your very midst. You have it again at your doors 
in the shape of Asiatic immigration. We in 
Europe are confronted with it, as I have tried to 
show you, along the great borderland of the 
Occident and Orient extending through Northern 
Africa and across Western and Central Asia, 
from the northwestern Atlantic to the shores of the 
Indian Ocean, even beyond. Its solution bristles 
with difficulties, but, for my own part, I refuse to 
dismiss it asinsoluble. I willsay this, at any rates 
that the more firmly we ourselves believe in the 
superiority of a civilization which, so far, it has 
been the privilege of the white man to build up 
in his occidental homelands, the more are we 
bound by its principles and the principles of the 
common Christianity which are its one sure 
foundation to do all in our power to temper the 
bitterness of a racial discord which, if it spreads 
and deepens, may threaten the future of the whole 
human race. 

Often as our own practice may have fallen 
short of our ideals, the common civilization of 
the Occident, to which America belongs quite 
as much as Europe, must surely set before us 


{ 213 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


definite ideals for which we should all strive as 
nations and as individuals. May I conclude by 
quoting to you the words in which those ideals 
have been so admirably expressed by one of my 
own fellow-countrymen that the late president 
of the United States, Mr. Harding, himself 
quoted them as “seeming to point to the true 
way out.” Sir Frederick Lugard says: 


Here then is the true conception of the interrelation of 
colour: complete uniformity in ideals, absolute equality in 
the paths of knowledge and culture; equal opportunity for 
those who strive, equal admiration for those who achieve; 
in matters social and racial a separate path, each pursuing his 
own inherited traditions, preserving his own race-purity and 
race-pride; equality in things spiritual, agreed divergence in 
the physical and material, 


In uttering those words Lugard was referring 
chiefly to Africa, where he earned his great 
reputation by practicing what he taught. But 
they afford, I think, equally wise guidance for 
the solution everywhere of the race problem upon 
which today more than ever before depends the 
peaceful readjustment of the relations between 
the Occident and the Orient, of which I have 
tried, however inadequately, to sketch the chief 
vicissitudes and the long evolution in _ history 
down to our own times. 


[ 214 } 


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INDEX 


Abbas Hilmi, 83, 84 
Abbaside dynasty, 24 
Abdul Hamid, 42, 58, 59, 140 


Abdul Hamid I, 43, 45, 47, 48; 
successor to, 49 


Abdul Rahman Khan, 196 

Abdul-Walid-Ibn-Rushd, 16 

Abu Bekr, 10, 11 

Abyssinia, 75 

Adly Pasha, 93, 95 

Adrianople, 21, 35 

Afghanistan, 50, 195, 197, 199, 
202 

Afghans, 196 

Africa, 205, 214 

Agadir, 156 

Akbar, 116 

Albanians, 45 

Alexander the Great, 37, 109 

Alexander II, 41 

Alexandria, 14, 743 77s 91, 99 

Algeciras, 155 

Algeria, 156, 209; annexation of, 
149; conquest of, 154 

Algiers, 23, 149 

Ali, 11, 129 

Allenby, Lord, 88, 97, 171 

Allied and Associated Powers, 
56, 57, 86, 89, 164, 171 


Allies, 51, 53, 57, 64, 85, 140, 
166, 170, 177 


Almohad princes, 16 

Amanulla Khan, 196 

Ameer-el-Mouminin, 60 

America, 27 f., 30, 54, 178, 189, 
Sar us Te a1 2, OE se ANG 
Armenian mandate, $4, 55; 
Zionism in, 175; see United 
States 

American advisers, 190, 193 

American Civil War, 73 

American mandate, 171 

American Relief Committee, 53 

Amritzar, 137 

Anglo-Egyptian relations, 94 

Anglo-French Convention of 
1904, 155 

Anglo-French jealousies, 172 

Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, 133 

Anglo-Russian agreement, 188 

Angora, 20, 58, 62, 104, 142, 184, 
186, 188; capital of Turkish 
Republic, 20 

Antioch, 14 

Arab, Assembly, 167; blood, 
1$1; conquerors, 19; Empire, 
71; independent, state, 170, 
171, 1773 provinces, 178; sci- 
ence, 15; world, 150; writers, 15 

Arabi, rebellion of, 77; Saad 
Zaghlul Pasha, a follower of, 82 

Arabia, 9, 44,166; Wahabis of,72 

Arabic, 14, 15, 18 


{ 217 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Arabsilg rz. Tey jess on tne 
Hejaz, 170; of Iraq, 166; 
in Syria and Palestine, 170 

Aristotle translated, 15, 16, 18 

Armenia, vii, 53, 186 

Armenian massacres, 47, 52 

Armenian question, 48 

Armenians, 58, 61; in Asia 
Minor, 65 

Armies, African, 160; British, 
55, 58, 63,77 f., 88, 91, 99, 1345 
169, 176, 191, 209; French, 
55, 134, 160, 176; Greek, 56, 
57, 58, 64; Indian, 134; 
Italian, 56; Persian, 194; 
Red, 201; Russian, 191; Turk- 
ish, 45, 46, 54, 72, I71, Ig0 

Armistice, 55, 86 

Art and literature, 14, 15 

Aryans, 121 

Asia, 37, 48, 184, 188, 195, 198, 
205; Central, 187, 199, 202; 


MINOT, 123; 28,1 5255595 15490543 
60, 64, 66 


Asquith, prime minister, 134 
Assassinations, political, 132 
Atlas Mountains, 151, 157, 161 
Austria, 35, 46, 84, 191 
Autonomy, 134, 149, 177 
Averroes, 16, 17, 18 

Aviation, British military, 99 
Avicenna, 15 


Bacon, Roger, 18 

Baghdad yi tay ass) OL inode 
Abbaside dynasty of, 24; 
Railway concession, 48 


Baku, 187, 192, 200 

Balfour Declaration, 172, 174 
Balkan peninsula, 35, 36 

Balkan states, 23, 36, 67 

Balkan Wars of 1912-13, $0, 140 
Baluchistan, 19% 


Baring, Sir Evelyn, 79; see 
Lord Cromer 


Beaconsfield, Lord, 140 
Beer, George Louis, 165 
Beirut, 170 

Bengal, 117, 142, 204 
Berbers, 151, 157 
Bismarck, 46 

Black Sea, 20, 23, 186 


Bokhara, 15, 202; soviet re- 
public of, 201 


Bolshevism, 64, 183, 185, 186, 


192, 198, 203; in Central 
Asia, 187; in Persia, 188, 192, 
195; Russian, 192; see 


Oriental Congress 

Bolshevist influences, 64, 192 

Bolshevist propaganda, 192, 200 

Bolshevist schools, 200 

Bombay, I11 

Bosporus, 60 

Brahmans, 121, 122 f., 124 

“British control,” 79, 81, 82, 83, 
90, 92, 97, I71; uprising 
against, 142 

British Empire, 60, 78, 98, 141; 
in Asia, 195; naval power, 37, 
55, 113; Parliament, 135 


British Indian Empire, 115, 116, 
199; expeditions, 195 


{ 218 } 


INDEX 


Bryce, Lord, 51 

Bryodo, Comrade, 200 

Buffer state, 195, 197 

Bulgaria, 36 

Bulgarian atrocities of 1876, 41 
Bulgars, 20 

Bunnias, 137 

Byzantine Empire, 12, 20, 71 


Cabot, John, 30 

“Cage,” the, 25 

Cairo, 16, 29, 78, 84, 86, 88, 89, 
91, 99 

Calcutta, 111, 144; university 
at, 126 


Canning, Sir Stratford, 38, 39 

Cantacuzene, 21 

Cape of Good Hope, 29, 37, 109 

“Capitalistic society,” 205 

“Capitulations,” 22, 66, 99; 
system of, 100 

Caste, 120; Bunnias, 137; Brah- 
minical, (121; Hindu, 207; 
relaxation of, 122 

Catharine of Braganza, 153 

Catherine the Great, 25 

Caucasus, the, 192, 201 

Chanak, 58 

Charles II, King, 153 

Chelmsford, Lord, 135 

China, 212 


Christendom, 22; militant, 18; 
Western, 24 


Christianity, 6, 7, 13, 17, 213 
Christian subject races, 26, 34, 
38, 47, 5° 


Christians, 34 

Civilization, 4; Andalusian, 151; 
Arab, 209; Christian, 22: 
Greek and Roman, 6, 12, 13; 
Hindu, 124; Mohammedan, 
18, 150; of the Occident, 18, 
S13) torientals 1) 136) 212 
Persian, 13; Western, 5, 104, 
120, 146, 162, 183, 205 

Clive, Lord, 117, 125 

Codrington, Admiral, 35 

Color problem, 213 

Columbus, Christopher, 28, 29, 
30 

“Comity of civilized nations,” 40 

Commisariat of Nationalities, 
200 

Commission of Inquiry, 89, 95; 
Lord Milner’s, 91, 94, 96 

Communications, security of, 98 

Communist University of Work- 
ers, 199 

“Concert of Europe,” 42, 47 

Congo, French, 156 

Congress of Vienna, 33 

Connaught, Duke of, 136 

Constantinople, 12, 19, 21, 22, 


24, 27, 29, 36, 37> 38, 39, 455 
46, 53, 58, 60, 61, 62, 104, 170, 


I7I 
Constitution, 44, 99, 136, 146 
Constitutional charter, 136, 146 
Cordova, 15, 16 
Council of Ministers, 61 
Crimean War, 40, 140 
Cromer, Lord, 79 f., 82, 83, 90 
Crusades, 19; First, 20; Last, 21 


[ 219 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Crusaders, Latin, 19; Western, 
21 


Culture, Islamic, 15; Saracenic, 
17; see Civilization 

Curzon, Lord, 192 

Cyprus, island of, 42 

Czar, Russian, 187 


Damascus, 11, 14, 16, 47, 176; 
Arab flag at, 171 

Dardanelles, 60 

Dar-el-Harb, 7 

Dar-ul-Islam, 7 

Das, 144 

Delhi, 123, 141, 204; capital, 
133; government at, 145 

Deportation, mass, 52 

Disraeli, 41 

Druse country, 177 

Dupleix, 113 

Dyer, General, 137 


East India Company, IIo, 113, 
117, 119, 125; policy of, 114 
East Indies, 110, 112 


Education, Western, 73, 77, 82, 
100, 119, .423,//029  T26; rat; 
LPT TASs el lO4s0 1 70s) e eOOe 
English teaching in, 127 f. 

Egypt, 23, 24, 37, 71, 73, 78, 87; 
88, 89, 196; aviation base, 99; 
autonomy for, 72; Bonaparte’s 
invasion, 72; British occupa- 
tion, 78; British protectorate 
terminated, 98; constitution 
for, 99; control of economic 
life, 100; cotton-growing in, 
73; credit of, 75; financial 


control of, 76; independence, 
72, 86, 89, 92, 97, 98, 209; 
Lord Cromer in, 79 ff.; under 
martial law, 85; in the Middle 
Ages, 150; recognized as free 
state, 98; self-government in, 
94; Treaty of Alliance with 
Great Britain, 94, 167; Turk- 
ish sovereignty over, 84 

Egyptian cabinet, 83, 87 

Egyptian government, 89, 98, 
IOI 

Egyptians, 51 

Elections, 99, 136, 
boycott of, 138 

Elizabeth, Queen, 110 

E]-Mamun, 15 

England, 30, 35, 40, 46, 57, 60, 
76, 81, 89, 92, 96, TOt, sos 
114, 117, 132,269, 1G.mmmes 
Igo 

English, 72, 109; newspapers in, 
206; teaching in, 127 f. 

Enver Pasha, 50, 52, 171, 202 

Europe, 37, 445 48, 73s 156, 193; 
205, 207; territories outside, 
164 

European money, 75 

European trade, 28 

Evkaf, 62 


Extremists, 144 


143, 1445 


Factories, 111 

Fanaticism, religious, 65; Mo- 
hammedan,-77 

Feisal, Arab king, 167, 176 

Ferghana, 202 

Rez. \0 59015 9eace 


{ 220 } 


INDEX 


Financial obligations, 66 
Financiers, 66; of Paris and 


London, 75 

Foreign Legion, 160, 161 

Foreign relations, 149, 150, 158, 
167, 196, 197 

Foreign trade, 153 

France, 12, 24, 35, 725 76, 77> 
89, 113, 114, 151, 154, 166, 170, 
176, 188, 198; mandate for 
Syria, 176 

French in Algiers, the, 149 f.; in 
Egypt, 72; in India, 112 

French Revolution, 35 

French scientific mission, 72 

Fuad, King, 99,103, 104;Prince, 85 


Gallipoli, 63 

Gandhi, Mahatma, 137, 138, 
141, 142, 143, 203, 204 

Genoa, 28 

George, Lloyd; see Lloyd George 

George, King, 133, 136 

German Military Mission, 64 

Germany, 333; 46, 59, 84, 1$5; 
156, 198 

Gibraltar, 157 

Giralda, 151 

Gladstone, 41 

Goltz, von der, 191 

Gordon, 102 

Government of India Bill, 135 

Granada, 16, 151 


Grand National Assembly, 58, 
61, 62; president of the, 61 


Grand Vizier, 62; a Tunisian, 45 


Great Britain, 39, 42, 72, 77, 


93> 94, 154, 177, 188, 196; 
mandate for Iraq, 167, 176; 
mandate for Palestine, 176; 
see England 


Great War, 4, 50, 51, 54, 57, 64, 


84, 133, 140, 141, 146, 166, 171, 
190; after the, 54, 160, 164 


Greece, 35, 53; independent 
state, 36 


Greek authors, translated, 14 
Greek civilization, 6, 12, 13, 66 
Greek disasters, 64 

Greek war of independence, 36 
Greeks, 35, 58; ancient, 6, 28, 66; 


of Asia Minor, 61, 65; of the 
Morea, 72 


Hadith (Traditions), 9 

Hamidian Pan-Islamism, 57 

Hamidian policy, 51 

Harding, President, 214 

Hardinge, Lord, 133 

Haroun-el-Rashid, 14 

Hauran, 177 

Hejaz, 166, 176, 177 

Hejaz Railway, 48 

Hindu philosophy, 208 

Hinduism, 120, 137; as a social 
system, 120 

Hindus, 123, 125 

Holy Alliance, 33 

Holy Land, 19, 20 

Holy War, 51, 196 

Hungary, 23 

Hussein, Prince, 85, 177 


{ 221 | 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 15 

Ilbert Bill, 129 

Imam-el-Kebir, 10 

Imperial Conference, 99 

India, 12, 29, 30, 73, 109, 110, 
196, 198, 203; British Empire 
OL wtlOe aS 30 tO eet 
experiment in, 146; British 
policy in, 135; British rule in, 
I1$, 125, 135; civilization of, 
IIO; constitutional charter, 
136; Dutch in, 112; early 
British settlements in, 30; 
French in, 112, 113; govern- 
ment of, 118, 127, 135 f., 140, 
149, 197; Hindu caste, 207; 
invasion of, 37, 109; independ- 
ence, 137 142; iron and steel, 
204; Mohammedan domina- 
tion, 142; mutiny, 74, 125, 
129; newspapers, 206; peace 
and progress, 126; period of 
transition, 146; Portuguese in, 
Iog, 112; Russian power in, 
39; self-government, 144; trade 
and industry, 203; twenty 
different languages, 128; vice- 
roy, 126; visit of King George 
and Queen Mary, 133; visit of 
Prince of Wales, 143 


Indian Councils Act, 133 

Indian High Commissioner, 145 

Indian National Congress, 130, 
139, 144 

Indian popular assembly, 136 

Indians, 5, 29, 51, 130 

Industrial competition, 212 


International administration of 
Tangier, 157 


International law, 78 
International problems, 3 
International relations, 33 


Iraq, 166, 167, 169, 209; Assem- 
bly, 169; independence of, 167, 
168; mandate for, 167; see 
Mesopotamia 

Irkutsk, 200 

Islam, 6, 7» 9; 12; 18, 44, 50, 140, 
141, 151, 184, 200, 209; Arab, 
27; dominant in India, 116; 
headship of, 10, 25; sword of, 
7,12, 16,115,142; triumph of, 
22;) Turkish, (27.0642 sees 
Mohammedanism 

Ismail, Khedive, 74, 75, 76, 
77 f:, 81; 103 


Italy, 33, 77 


Izvestia, 201 


Jamshidpur, 204 
Janissaries, the, 26, 34 
Japan, 132, 212 

Fehad (holy war), 51 
Jerusalem, 47, 173 


Jews, 49 
Judaism, 7 


Kabul, 195, 196, 197 
Kali, goddess, 131 
Kautsky, 200 


Kemal, Mustapha; see Musta- 
pha Kemal 

Khalif, temporal power, 59; title 
of, 24 

Khalifa-Rassul-Allah, to 


{ 222 } 


INDEX 


Khalifate, 11, 12, 43, 58, 59, 188, 
209; Abbaside, 14; abolition 
of, 62, 142; Arab, 20, 209; 
future of, 104; Indian, 139; 
Islamic, 24; movement, Io, 
140, 141; Ommayad, 14; 
Ottoman, 63, 67; separate at 
Cordova, 15, 16; Turkish, 
42, 45, 51, 57, 67, 152 

Khanate, 201 

Khartum, 102 


Khedive, Ismail, 74, 75, 76, 
77 £.; Tewfik, 77 


Khiva, 201, 202 

Khorezm, soviet republic of, 201 
Kirghiz steppes, 202 

Kitchener, Lord, 84, 102 
Kokhand, 202 

Koran, 8, 9, 12, 63 

Koreish tribe, 10 

Kurdistan, Mountains of, 168 
Kurds, 45 

Kutubia, 151 


Lausanne, 141, 168, 186; see 
Treaties 


League of Nations, vii, 60, 118, 


164, 168, 169, 170, 177, 1793 
covenant of, 172 


Lebanon, 175, 177 
Legislative Council, 175 
Legislature, All-Indian, 135 
Lenin, 64, 184, 199, 200 
Lepanto, 35 

Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 74 


Lloyd George, 55, 56, 95, 97, 
98, 99, 134 


London, 85, 206 
Lugard, Sir Frederick, 214 


Lyautey, Marshall, 158, 160, 
161, 163 


Macaulay, 119; at Calcutta, 119 


' Madras, 111, 119 


Mahdi, 101 

Malabar coast, 141 

Malta, 41, 88, 89, 140 

Mameluke sultans, 24, 29 

Mandate, for Iraq, 167, 176; 
French, 175; for Syria and 
Palestine, 172, 176, 177 

Mandates, 149, 169 

Mandatory power, 170 

Mandatory system, 164, 175, 
209; Syria under, 171, 177, 178 

Maronites, 175 

Marrakesh, 151, 153 

Marx, Karl, 200 

Mary, Queen, 133 

Massacre, 52, 53 

Mecca, 166, 200; sherif of, 141 

Medersas, of Fez, 151 

Medina, 200 

Mediterranean, 23, 28, 37, 71, 74 

Merchants, 66 

Mesopotamia, 51, 55, 166, 191, 
196; see Iraq 

Middle Ages, 15, 28, 150 

Midhat Pasha, 44 


Milner, Lord, 90, 93, 
Report of, 98 


Minorities, protection of, 98 
Minority, at Baghdad, 168 


167; 


{ 223 ] 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Moghul Empire, 111, 112, 145; 
decay of the, 114 

Mohamed Ali, 37, 71, 72, 101, 
139 

Mohamed Burgash, 152 

Mohammed, 7, 8, 9, 13, the 
Conqueror, 21, 22 

on ge cant agitation in India, 

° 

Mohammedan Bolshevist Con- 
yress, 187, 192 

Mohammedan conquerors, 115 

Mohammedan movement, 139 


Mohammedan religion, 57, 152, 
194; orthodoxy, 11; Sacred 
Law, 160, 209; Shiah, state, 
193; see Shiahs, Suhnis 


Mohammedan states under 
Russia, 199 

Mohammedan world, 57, 61 

Mohammedanism, 6, 20, 208; 
see Islam 

Mohammedans, 25, 26, 45, 49; 
conservatism of, 164; French, 
51; hostile to French mandate, 
176; Indian, §1, 57, 124, 130, 
139, 140; massacred, 
orthodox, 159; in Palestine, 
174 

Monotheism, 9, 124 

Montagu, 134 

Moorish architecture, 160, 162 

Moors, 152; driven from Spain, 
150; independence, 150 f. 

Moplahs, rising of, 141, 142 

Morea, 72 

Morgenthau, 51 


2025 


Morley, John, 132 

Morocco, 7, 23, 150, 1§2, 154, 
155, 163; arts and crafts of, 
160; economic resources of, 
156; under French protector- 
ate, 150, 156, 164, 209; Moor- 
ish population, 162; political 
independence, 156; Sultans of, 
153 

Moscow, 184, 186, 199, 200, 
201, 204 

Mosul, 60, 168; oil in, 168 

Mudania Convention, 58 

Muezzin, 7 

Mujtahid, 193 

Mulai Hafid, 156, 157, 158 

Mulai Yusef, 158 

Munro, Sir Thomas, 119, 129 

Mustapha Kemal, 54, 58, 61, 
63, 64, 184, 185, 187, 188, 194; 
first president of Turkey, 61 

Mutiny of 1857, 74, 125, 129 


Napoleon, 37, 71 
Napoleonic wars, 35 
Nationalism, 50, 77, 82, 185, 


194, 208; principle of, 33, 77, 
129 


Nationalist movement, 78, 83, 
86, 105 

Navarino, 35 

Near East, 54, 66, 188 

Newfoundland, 30 

New York, 206 

Nicolas I, Czar, 38 


Nile,75; the Blue and White, 
102 


[ 224 } 


INDEX 


Non-violence, 


Gandhi 


North America, 29, 30, 110, 112; 
French dominion in, 113 


Novy Vostok, 205 


TAG Vy Utals) see 


Occident, 21, 49, 73, 104, 131, 
SO aOr fog ML 2ITT, (214! 
civilization of, 12; and the 
Orient, 32 19, 275 33, 49, 63; 
64, 67, 71, 94, 115, 164, 173, 
183, 205 

Oil, 168; see Mosul 

Omdehs, the, go 

Ommayad dynasty, 11 

Orenburg, 202 

Orient, 27, 33, 163; Moham- 
medan, 50; resources of, 206; 
trade in the, 28; see Occident 

Oriental Congress, 187; at 
Baku, 192, 200; bolshevism 
at, 187, 192 

Orkhan, 21 


Othman, 20, 25; House of, 59, 
62; sword of, 59 


Ottoman Empire, 20, 23, 27, 28, 
36, 38, 39, 49, 53, 54 67, 84, 
150, 177, 188; Arab lands in, 
71, 164, 165; climax of, 25; 
name of, 21; old, 65; passing 
of the, 33 

Ottoman sultanate, 24, 63; au- 
tonomous province of, 79; ca- 
pitulations surrendered, 99 


Palestine, 23, 170, 172 f., 209; 
see Zionist movement 
Palmerston, 74 


Panchayats, 38 

Pan-Islamic policy, 45, 46, 48, 
50, 140 

“Panther,” the, 156 

Pan-Turanian Empire, 65, 185 

Pan-Turanian movement, 50 

Paris, 17,206; Treaty of 1856, 40 

Paris Peace Conference, vii, 
55, 88, 164, 171 

Peace, 7, TSIO7 

Persia.) 12.) 19,1233, 37. 50, 187; 
190, 193, 199; bolshevism in, 
188; republic, 194 

Persian finance, 190 

Persian reformers, 189 


Pitt, 118; Government of India 
Act, 118 


Plassey, battle of, 113, 117 
Poland, 23, 26, 35 

Political ascendancy, 207 
Political exiles, 199; see Russia 


Portuguese, 28, 29, 33; in India, 
109 


Powers, the, 42; see Allies 

Protectorate, British, 78; 85, 89, 
93, 98, 149, 1503 French, 150, 
156 f., 161; Russian, 38 

Protectorates, 149, 210 

Prussia, 35 

Punjab, 137 

Quebec, battle of, 113 

Racial feeling, 129, 160, 173, 211 

Railway, Caspian, 199; Hejaz, 
48; Siberian, 199 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 30 


[ 225 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Reds, 201, 202 
Reform Bill of 1832, 119 


Religion, 6, 49, 71, 128; Moham- 
medan, 194; wars of, 19; see 
Christianity 

Religious customs, III 

Religious discord, 173 

Religious fanaticism, 65 

Renaissance, 18 

Riff tribesmen, 157 

Rights, hereditary, 
minorities, 61 

Ripon, Lord, 129 

Riza Khan, 194 

Robert College, at 
tinople, 170 

Roman Empire, 71 


2, 149; of 


Constan- 


Romans, 28 

Rome, 22 

Rumania, 36 

Russia, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 46, 
65, 140, 183, 190; in Asia, 195; 
bolshevist, 197; czarist, 187; 
Imperial, 198; influence in 
Persia, 189; political exiles 
from, 199; Soviet, 66, 185, 
186, 187, 193, 197, 199, 201 

Russian anarchism, 131, 184 

Russian Church, 184 

Russian government in Asia, 200 

Russian protectorate, 38 

Russian Revolution, 196, 199 

Russo-Turkish War, 43 


St. Sophia, 22 
Salisbury, Lord, 46 


Salonica, 49 

“Samarkand, Golden Road to,” 
14 

Samuel, Sir Herbert, 174 

Sanders, Limon von, 63 

San Remo Conference, 176 

Science, 15, 16, 138 

Scot, Michael, 18 

Self-determination, 86, 101, 185, 
186, 197, 199, 207 

Self-government, 119; local, in 
Egypt, 83, 90, 94; in India, 
11g (see Swaraj); in Iraq, 167 

Selim the Grim, 24, 42, 71 

Seljukide Empire, 20 

Seraglio, 26, 43 

Serbia, 36 

Serbs, 20; rebellion of, 35 

Seville, 16, 151 

Shiahs, 11, 13, 168, 193 

Shiekh-ul-Islam, 62 

Shiva, 131 

Shuster, 190 

Siberia, 198 

“Sick man,” 27 

Slave trade, 118, 153 

Smyrna, 53, 58 

Sobiesky, John, 26 

Soliman the Magnificent, 25, 43 

Soviet delegates, 187; see Russia 

Soviet republics, 192, 201, 202 

Spain, 12, 17,' \1§0;)) Arabs 
driven out of, 18, 150; con- 
quest of, 15, 151; dominions 


O83 


{ 226 } 


INDEX 


Spaniards, 28, 29 

Spiritual power, 10, 24, 43, 44, 
59, 121, 159; and temporal, 10 

Stalin, 200 

Stamboul, 44 

Strikes, political, 88 

Sublime Porte, 44 


Sudan, the, 75, 98, 101; recon- 
quest of, 102 


Suez, 74 

Suez Canal, 51, 74 

Sultanate, 58, 188; Ottoman, 63 

Sulva Bay, 63 

Sunni Mohammedans, 193 

Sunnis, 11, 13 

Supremacy, racial, 59 

Surat, III 

Swaraj, 134, 136, 138 

Swarajists, 204 

Syria, vii, 23, 51, 55, 88, 170, 175, 
176, 209 

Syrians, 45, 171 


Talaat, 52, 171 

Tangier, 152 f., 157 
Tashkend, 200, 201, 202 
Tatars, 192, 203 

Teheran, 189, 190, I91, 194 
Tel-el-Kebir, battle of, 77 
Tewfik, Khedive, 77 
Theocracy, 10, 59; Islamic, 44 
Thrace, 53, 58, 60 

pelalsit, 37 

Toledo, 16 

Trade unions, 204 


Trade, Western, 73, 206 
Traders, Dutch, 112 
Transcaucasus, 186 
Translations, 14, 15, 18 


Treaty: of alliance between 
Egypt and Great Britain, 94; 
bilateral, 167; of Lausanne, 
59, 66, 99, 186; of Paris in 
1866, 40; Persian with Britain, 
191; of San Stefano, 42; of 
Sévres, 53, 60; of Ungkiar 
Skelessi, 38; of Versailles, 
54, 99, 172 

Treaties, of alliance, 116, 201; 
international, 78; of subordi- 
nate alliance, 149 

Tripoli, 23, 50, 209; 
invasion of, 140 

Tsargrad, 37 

Tunis, 23; 
150, 209 

Turkestan, soviet republic of, 201 


Turkey, 23, 26, 35, 42, 46, 47, 
54, 65, 77, 85, 184, 191, 198; 
banished from Europe, 53; 
capitulations surrendered to, 
99; claimed Mosul, 168, 170; 
defense of, 40; European, 34, 
35, 36, 41; hardships of, 65; 
lost Arab provinces, 60; new, 
66; population of, 65; resur- 
gence of, 140; revolt of Mecca, 
141, 166; terms of peace, 55; 
war with Western powers, 185 

Turkish conquest, 23; of Egypt, 
29 

Turkish Empire, 38, 51, 56; rule 
of, revised, 60; savagery in, 52; 
sultans, of, 152; traditions of,59 


Italian 


protectorate over, 


| 227 } 


THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 


Turkish Republic, 11, 63, 186; 
declared, 61 

Turkish Revolution of 1908-1909, 
49 


Turks, 5, 19, 23, 25, 30, 53, 57 
60, 187; atrocities of, 52; see 
Young Turks 


Ulema, 91 

Union and Progress Committee, 
49, 171 

United States, vii, 118, 172, 
178, 205; see America 

University at Beirut, 170 

University of Calcutta, 126 

University of El Azhar, 91, 104 

University of Fez, 152, 163 

University of London, 126 

University of Padua, 17 


Vedas, 120 

Venice, 28 

Vernacular newspapers, 200, 206 
Vespucci, Amerigo, 28 

Victoria, Queen, 126 

Vienna, 23, 26 


Wahabis, 72 

Wales, Prince of, in India, 143 

War of Independence, American, 
117 

West African colonies, of France, 
154 

West Indies, 29 

Whitehall, Indians at, 145 

Wilberforce, 118 

William II, of Germany, 46, 48, 
50 

Wilson, President, 86, 164, 171, 
207 

World-dominion, 46 


Yeldiz Kiosk, 44, 455 46, 47 
Young Turks, 50, 51, 72, 139 


Zaghlul Pasha, Saad, 82, 83, 84, 
86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 95, 99, 103 

Zanzibar, under British pro- 
tectorate, 150 


Zinovieff, Comrade, 187, 188 
Zionist movement, 173, 175, 176 
Zionists, 173, 174 


PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 


{ 228 } 


The Following Volumes Are Published 
Under the Norman Wait Harris 
Memorial Foundation 


= 1 Pet 


The Occident and the Orient 
By Sir Valentine Chirol 


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China, and Russia and their addresses are important aids to the better 
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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IIl. 





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